It is certainly annoying when your web server is down, simply because you lose visitors and potential customers. But do you realize that you might be losing more visitors and potential customers that your website can’t be accessed? According to Vanessa Fox Google, “If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, these pages might disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl again.” How know - that your server is down constantly checking your sites?
From there you can decide whether it’s time to find another server solution. Unless you have no life and you want to monitor your web site by hand, hitting the refresh button every five or ten minutes, you will probably be interested in a tool to monitor the process for you. Fortunately, some major tools exist to achieve this goal, and the best of them are free. These free services you can monitor downtime, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they will let you know if there is a problem, either by e-mail, RSS or even on your mobile phone via SMS. Some of the best 5 free services to monitor your server downtime, in no particular order:
- http://www.montastic.com
- http://www.siteuptime.com
- http://host-tracker.com
- http://mon.itor.us
- http://www.serviceuptime.com
Once you know, there was a question of downtime, you can register for free by Google webmaster tools to see if Googlebot tried to index your site, while he was on the decline. Webmaster tools provide a variety of other services as well. Simply click on the link webmaster tools and register your site if you have not already. Once registered, you can check the “crawl errors” to see if there have been problems.
You can also check the frequency of visits by Googlebot to see how long windows are among explorations. If your site is not often explored, of course, you will not have to worry about short Outages. You do not have to worry too much if Googlebot not miss Does your site to a crawl because the site was down. Vanessa Fox also said that Googlebot will give your site a bit before trying to actually dropping the pages of Google search results. But even if this is not a real hit and miss, you will always wise to monitor downtime of your server and make adjustments if necessary. Obviously, if your site is down, people will rarely give you another chance. If your website goes too often, it is in your interest to move your site to another host before you begin actively promoting.
