Primary Uptime Monitor Uses:
- Uptime reporting
- Response time reporting
- Detailed log
- Banner creation0
- Public reports
- Email reports
Uptime Reporting
Simply put, this reports all the time that your site does not go down. If your site does fluctuate in performance it will show up in this report. Downtime should never be less than 99.98%. If it does dip below this, confront the hosting company for a reason why.
It’s important to have a strong uptime. It is part of how the quality of a hosting company is measured. If they do not live up to their guarantee you may consider moving.
Response Time Reporting
This tool is very helpful. It measures the time it takes the server to respond to a page request. Ideally the response time should be pretty low and consistent. Below 1 second is ideal. This can include a number of factors that affect it. However, consistency should remain the same if your site has not changed in content or function.
Detailed Log
Detailed log keeps track of all of every ping that goes to the website and provides information based on what the status was.
One reason this is helpful is that you can search back to a specific time of day and see why the site was down.
Public Reports
This generates a page that anyone can view that gives details about the site you select. It has several options that make it easy to check a set of stats from a given time period. Say you need to get clients or people outside the website a way to look at the stats, this offers you an easy way to do that.
Pingdom is the company we use that has this feature. They also let you customize how you display some of the details.
Banner Creation
Companies like Pingdom allow you to create a banner that displays either Response Time or Uptime in the past 30 days or a custom set range. This banner can be used to keep track of your site publicly.
Email Reports Subscription
This pushes out emails to a group of subscribers with a report. Name the email report, pick a report type, select date range, then choose your contacts. It’s pretty easy and it can be good to show that your clients that a site is stable and reliable.
David writes for a couple different websites that work with hosting and consumer reviews. He brings real-world application to harder to understand concepts in order to help people learn about specific subject matter. He also knows HTML, CSS and PHP to help out with building and configuring sites.
