How do I know if my website is available?
A client reports that your website isn’t loading, which makes you look bad. But could you have prevented this? Is it possible to be notified when problems occur? The answer is YES.
If we’re lucky, we realize our website is no longer working correctly ourselves or through our employees, but sometimes it’s unfortunately thanks to our suppliers or even worse, our clients. Let’s just say it looks bad… Oops!
What is availability?
When we talk about validating that a website remains functional continuously, we are referring to a site’s availability. And the act of ensuring this is called surveillance or monitoring. In English, you will often see the terms Uptime Monitoring or Availability Monitoring used for this concept.
In a website context, availability monitoring therefore consists of performing automated and constant validation of your site’s availability in order to notify you as soon as a problem occurs and provide you with information regarding its nature, with the goal of allowing you to fix it.
How does monitoring work?
Because your website runs 24 hours a day, tools allow you to automate the availability validation process. Several tools are available for this purpose, sometimes as part of enterprise software and other times using web services that can be free or paid, depending on your needs.
A monitoring tool will send a very simple type of request to a website. This requires the website to provide an HTTP 200 response, the equivalent of “the website is working.”
The tool will therefore send these requests at regular intervals and can often provide you with a graph and availability statistics over time. Often, the tool will also capture your website’s response time, which can help detect a slowdown of your site.
Finally, if the availability monitoring tool receives a response from the site indicating a problem (a 500 error for example), then it can notify you by email, SMS, or even a phone call!
Learning that our site isn’t working is never pleasant, but not knowing and finding out (sometimes several hours later!) from someone else is even less desirable.
Once notified, you can visit the monitoring tool’s dashboard, which will give you additional information on the nature of the problem encountered and how long ago it occurred.
What other types of monitoring are possible?
Sometimes, ensuring a website’s availability is not enough. For example, your online store will stop accepting payments in the absence of a valid security certificate.
Before implementing an availability monitoring strategy, you will want to determine the nature and importance of what the website does.
Here are the elements that can be configured in most monitoring tools:
- URL to monitor
- Access that bypasses caching
- Availability validation frequency
- Response speed
- Request type (ping, get, post)
- Notification type (email, sms, call, push, etc.)
- Notification delegation schedule
- Buffer period (before notification, after return to normal, etc.)
- SSL certificate expiration validation
- Domain name expiration validation
- Presence of scheduled maintenance windows
- Verification from different geographic zones
Without explaining each point in detail, it should be noted that each site could be configured differently based on its specific needs.
Let’s take the example of an online store with customers in Quebec and France that sells thousands of dollars per day.
It is likely that a monitoring strategy would include the following aspects:
- Monitoring of several URLs, for the home page as well as the shop page and some typical products
- Access bypassing caching, because customers accessing their accounts will not be handled by caching
- High availability validation frequency, because every minute lost means lost revenue
- Notifications sent to several people or internal departments, with automated delegation for time zone changes
- Continual validation of the SSL certificate’s proper functioning, as it is essential for online payment
- Possibly verification from different geographic points to ensure each continent has a trouble-free experience
Finally, many organizations set up status pages for their websites and systems to inform users and allow them to subscribe to downtime notifications themselves.
Here, for example, is the web points of presence status page for SatelliteWP.
There are dozens of companies offering availability monitoring services. Here are a few:
But remember… it’s not so much the service you choose that matters as its configuration based on your availability monitoring strategy and this in light of your technical and business needs.
Impacts of an unavailable site
Besides the fact that an unavailable site can inconvenience your internal processes or your visitors, there are even more disruptive impacts.
If you have just launched an advertising campaign leading customers to complete a form on your website and the site stops working under the number of requests… how many potential opportunities will you lose before knowing that your website has been down for several hours?
If your business is known to the general public, what would be the impact if it were reported that your site was non-functional in newspapers or reputable social media accounts? Furthermore, a site’s unavailability may be due to a cyberattack, a possibility that may be raised in the reported news.
These examples are very real: site unavailability can cost time, money, and reputation.
It is therefore advisable to try to avoid this type of incident by having an availability monitoring strategy that will minimize the risks of significant impacts following a web problem.
The importance of your website’s availability
As you can now see, availability monitoring goes far beyond knowing if a site is functional or not, and becomes a full-fledged element of managing your online presence.
A site today is an essential element of your marketing; it’s a member of your team that works 24 hours a day… as long as you monitor everything to make sure of it!
Contact our agency of WordPress experts to discuss your availability monitoring needs. We will be happy to help you determine what will ensure your site operates optimally.
