Do you know the repercussions when your web server is down? Not only do you lose potential visitors and customers, but you may be “ignored” by search engines when they crawl your website. According to Google, if the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your web pages, those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again. But how do you know your server is down without constantly checking your sites? This chapter will share some free services to help you assess your downtime. From there, you can decide if it’s time to look for another server solution.
Unless you want to monitor your website by hand, hitting the Refresh button from time to time to see if the server is down, you’ll be glad to know that there are tools out there to monitor this process for you, and the best ones are free. These free services can monitor your downtimes 24/7 and will let you know if there’s a problem either via email, RSS or even on your cell phone via SMS.
Here are some of the best recommended free services to monitor your server downtimes:
http://host-tracker.com/
[http://www.mralert.com/]
http://www.siteuptime.com/
Google also offers free tools for webmasters to determine if the Googlebot tried to index your site while it was down. You can also check the frequency of Googlebot visits to see how long it takes between crawls; If your site isn’t crawled often, then you won’t have to worry about occasional short downtime. Google also provides the webmaster with a variety of other useful services like Web Optimizer, Web Analytics just to name a few.
It won’t be the end of the world for you and your website if Googlebot misses your site on a particular crawl because the site was down. Google has openly stated that Googlebot will give your site a few tries before removing it from Google search results pages. Even if that is the case, it is still advisable to monitor your server downtimes and make adjustments when necessary. Why take the risk?
From the above, we can see that visitors, customers and even search engines rarely penalize you almost immediately if your website is down. Therefore, if your website goes down too often, it will be in your best interest to move your website to another host before you start active promotion.
