Title:
Keeping Tabs On Your Hosting Company
Word Count:
419
Summary:
Once you have decided on the company to whom you are going to entrust
your websites or blogs, you will always have that period where you wait
anxiously for the first problems to arise. This is not because so many
hosting companies are bad, more that there is plenty of negative press
about the hosting industry in general and tends to make webmasters a
little paranoid.
Keywords:
hosting websites monitor monitoring uptime downtime hosts webhosts
Article Body:
There are so many web hosting services available nowadays that even
making an informed decision can be an almost impossible task.
Once you have decided on the company to whom you are going to entrust
your websites or blogs, you will always have that period where you wait
anxiously for the first problems to arise. This is not because so many
hosting companies are bad, more that there is plenty of negative press
about the hosting industry in general and tends to make webmasters a
little paranoid.
However, eventually, anyone running a website is going to bow to the
inevitable and buy a hosting package.
So, once you've committed to your host of choice, how do you know that
they are fulfilling their promises of 99.9% uptime? A lot of people
have no idea of course, and assume that their sites are up and visible to
the world 24/7. If a major problem arises you will soon become aware of
it naturally, but what if you are experiencing downtime while you are not
around? How often are people visiting your URL and landing on an error
page? If that sort of thing happens too often, your visitors will soon
give up returning.
It is therefore a good idea to monitor your host's performance on a daily
basis. If they guarantee a certain percentage of uptime and fail to
deliver on that promise, you may well find you are entitled to some
compensation. Check the company's terms of service. This is all well and
good, but often, the onus will be on you to prove that the downtime
occurred.
Now, accepting that if downtime was excessive, you will probably be more
inclined to switch to another hosting company, but if it is a case of
only ocasional service outage, you might be prepared to tolerate it and
just call the company on it.
However, if you don't monitor their performance, you will have no
ammunition and your bargaining position will be compromized. It's easy to
monitor your host's performance using free third party applications, and
I currently use two services, one for daily, weekly, monthly and
quarterly reports and another for real time tracking which will alert me
as soon as a website goes down. Downtime Witness is a free service, and
you can get a free registration key by visiting the link in the resource
box at the foot of this message.
Alternatively or additionally you might want to use a reporting service
such as the one provided by host-tracker.com