If you have only 1 website or 100 websites is website monitoring worth the trouble and/or expense?
Website monitoring can be useful for several different reasons….

• Running PPC campaigns? If your website goes down you ads still run- you still pay for clicks but cannot get conversions costing your $$$
• Running advertisements using your website address? Useful to know if your site is down and customers looking at a blank page
• Have an ecommerce site? Customers can’t order if your site is down

Selecting the right webhost is critical if you intend to use any of your sites for e-commerce or any type of pay per click marketing. You hear all the promises of 99.999996% uptime or some similar number but all hosts eventually will have down time. Typically down time is related to planned service outages which usually you are informed of ahead of time.

I have only experienced outages as a result of a planned outage and the one time I thought my site was down I traced the problem to a dns issue on my end.

So I looked around for website monitoring and here is what I found

There are generally two type of website monitoring available

Website monitoring service
Lots of options here basically to have several sites monitored you pay a fee- most services have a free option for just one site.

One option that caught my eye was Adsupervision

This service monitors your site and in case it goes down it will stop your ppc campaigns on Google, Yahoo and 7search. The system uses a system of rotating IP’s in eight locations worldwide to check the status of your websites. I laughed when I read on the free option you have to give a link back to their website. If your going to be managing a bunch of sites it gets real expensive real fast

Desktop website monitoring
You run the website monitoring on your computer- application sits in the tray bar and pings your servers whenever there is a net connection. You can check as many sites as you need. Perfect is you have a server sitting around the house running windows. A good option I found here is SiteC for only $29.95. If your serious about monitoring your sites this is the solution. Cheap and easy. As long as it’s connected to the net you get real time alerts and a variety of different parameters from email to your web site status

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