How to Know When Your Site is Down

It hurts when your site goes down. Check out how to get notified when site goes down so that you can make it online again.

Every blogger tries to ensure that his/her site is always up and running. While hosting providers guarantee 99.9% uptime, literally means your site will not go down but practically it depends on the type of hosting that you are choosing. Dedicated and VPS hosting will have almost zero downtime for your site but with shared hosting, you will have trouble all the time. For example, in my early article on an issue with Hostgator, in the last paragraph, I mentioned website downtime with HostGator.

When your site is down, you encounter the following problems -

• Bad experience for the users/subscribers
• Search engine ranking will be dropped significantly: Google or any other search engine doesn't like not found or 404 error webpages. In no time your top #1 to #3 keywords will see a drop.
• Effects on your business: The greater impact is seen on your business when your site is down.

How to Know When Your Site is Down

Nobody likes downtime. But before fixing downtime, you should analyze what is the actual cause of the issue. There are many reasons why your site isn't up and running.

Some of them are mentioned below -

• Bandwidth limit reached
• Downtime due to server upgrade
• Part of the servers have been hacked
• Unable to go live due to Plugin issue
• Unable to go live due to wrong coding
• DNS problem
• Other coding, encryption, and connection errors

All these will lead to downtime of your site which is not a good thing. You should always ensure that you have little or less downtime, every time. If your site is down you can go to Downforeveryoneorjustme.com and check it out.

Method 2: Automatic Email Updates When Site is Down

We are humans and we cannot continuously sit in front of a PC checking for downtime or uptime. This is where we need a machine [general term] to let us know when our site is down.

We are using the Jetpack by WordPress.com Plugin which we already told you that it's one of the essential WordPress Plugins that everyone should install if based on WordPress platform. We have also gone through 9 features that make JetPack the best plugin ever.

Now JetPack plugin has a different module and one of them is the Monitor Module which when activated gives you a notification directly to your email when the site goes down. Interestingly it also sends you an email when the site goes up online again, letting you know how many minutes/hours your site was down. That's a great thing.

Learn how I make $3000+ a month from blogging

Here is how to turn on website downtime notifications to your email ID -

• Login to your WordPress site and go to the Admin area.
• From Plugins install the JetPack by WordPress.com plugin.
• Once it's installed and activated, the plugin Setting is located just below the Dashboard.
• Hit that and go to JetPack Settings.
• Once you are through that go to Monitor Module and click on Activate.
• Once you do that, you will have the Configure option.
• Now provide your email ID to activate email notifications.
• Now click on 'Save Changes'.

Now once you do that setting, you will receive an email like this one, whenever your site goes down and when it goes online.

What is the other method through which you get notified when your site is down? Do let us know via the comment below.