All web sites in the world are available 99.9% of the time, if not less.
How on Earth did I come to that conclusion? Simple. I checked the web sites of as many hosting providers as I could. Every single one promised availability 99.9% of the time or more.
I am sure most of you will eye my conclusion with suspicion. After all, it is not uncommon to find your site to be unavailable from time to time. You probably just accept the fact and move on. You shouldn’t.
Why should you care about your web site’s availability? Because when your site is down, you may be losing business. I found out today, for example, that during the last thirty days, my site was down for eight hours and fifty-three minutes. In fact, I got a detailed break up of those eight hours and fifty-three minutes. On November 16, 2006 for instance, my site was down for five hours and forty-six minutes starting at 1:00:50 AM. I now know the site was available 98.77% of the time and unavailable 1.23% of the time in the last thirty days. Obviously, my hosting provider is doing a lousy job. But my site is not a commercial site. If it is unavailable for a while, I have no reason to be apoplectic. If, on the other hand, my site had a storefront, I could potentially have lost business. Or if my site were a calling card site, I could have lost a visitor who might have given me tons of business.
Naturally, if you have a web site for your business, you must monitor its availability. But how? The answer to the question has three parts. First, choose a reliable hosting provider. Second, monitor your site for availability. And third, be prepared to take up the issue with your hosting service provider.
Monitoring a site for availability is a task that screams for automation. An application that can seek a response from your site at regular intervals would be ideal. As it happens, there are subscription services that will monitor your site at regular intervals. But they also lighten your wallet at regular intervals. Regular readers of this column know that I prefer free (free, in my vocabulary, means no advertisements either), no-strings-attached alternatives to paid services. I found one for this purpose too - Site 24X7.
Site 24X7 is an industrial-strength site monitoring service. To start using it, you must register at the site. Once you create an account, you can set up a "monitor". A monitor is a set of parameters for polling your web site. The only mandatory parameter you need to choose is the polling frequency - the interval at which the service should poll your site. If you are a savvy user, you can increase the granularity of the checks by monitoring form submission methods, URL changes, and maximum response time, among others. Once you set up your monitor, the service will start polling your site at the specified interval.
Site 24X7 considers your site to be unavailable if the...
- site is not accessible at all
- page does not come up in 30 seconds
- HTTP response code begins with 4 or 5.
Site 24 X 7: Sample Site Report
The service can communicate polling results to you in two ways: by sending you alerts when the site goes down (and when it comes back up again), and by sending you daily, weekly, or monthly reports such as the one shown above. You can choose to get the alerts by e-mail or by SMS.
That’s it. You will start getting regular alerts such as the one I described earlier on. The alerts consist of graphs and tables that provide information about the time at which your site was unavailable, the time at which it became available again, and the percentage of the time your site was available and unavailable. They catalog the response time for each request and calculate the average response time as well. You can log in to your account and view historical reports online. I like the 30-day report, because most hosting service providers provide the uptime guarantee on a monthly basis.
Site 24X7 features a transaction monitoring service as well. A transaction is a set of steps. For example, you may want to know how long it takes for a user to log in to your site. You can set up a transaction monitor by downloading a "recorder" from the site. The recorder is a mini-browser with a row of recorder buttons at the top. To record your transaction, enter the URL of your login page and click on the "Go" button. That will bring up your login page in the recorder. It will look just as it looks in a browser. Go ahead and log in to your site. After the login is complete, click the "Stop" button on the recorder. In effect, the recorder captured the steps in logging on to your site. Save the transaction. Then on, the service will log in to your site at specified intervals and alert you of the performance.
If you find that your site is unavailable longer than the limits specified in your hosting service agreement, you should contact your provider. If you arm yourself with supporting documentation, as you will have with Site 24X7 reports, your service provider will likely address the issue by fixing the web server or moving your site to a new one.
You should remember is that every time Site 24X7 accesses your site, your web server will log an entry in the server logs. This may distort your traffic statistics. Remember to filter out the records whose user agent starts with "Site 24 X 7".
Even if you have chosen a hosting service provider with great care, you should still monitor your web site’s availability. Regular monitoring will help you keep your service provider honest!