Having a site that always runs smoothly is every site owner’s dream because if it doesn’t, it will affect the business and nobody wants that to happen. But it is not just about the owner’s wishes – visitors also want the site that they are browsing to run as flawless as possible.
From the site owners’ point of view, there could be a lot of problems happening that will make the site either crash or slow down. Just imagine how much business is lost, and profit as well, if your site is down for more than, let’s say an hour. A lot, the answer is a lot!
But it is not just about the sales that would have happened in that affected time – it is about whether the customer will come back to your site? Or if he/she does come back, will the site still be down? And the most important of all, when he/she came back, was there any information on when the site will be back online?
Having a site that is working flawlessly is hard, but managing the problems that can occur on the site and slow it down is even harder. Solving those mysteries around your site being down can be as hard as a crime scene. Where are the clues to what caused the problem? Who or what is to blame? How to fix it? A lot of questions that you can’t find an answer to.
It would be great to have a tool that will monitor your site 24/7, and when something happens, that will let you know immediately. And in this article, we will present to you a tool just like that. So let’s dive in!
Monitoring tools
Having the answers to all the questions we asked you in the introductory part is easy when you have the right tool, a website monitoring tool. With it, solving website crime scenes will never be the same.
You want a tool that will alert you when your site doesn’t contain a keyword, doesn’t respond to a ping, or God forbid becomes unavailable. Well, we got you covered.
Better Uptime is a great tool for that and a lot more. You will probably stumble across it once or twice because it covers all the problems your site can have.
When you are monitoring your site, you can see how the site is doing at the moment and send a test alert so that you can monitor the response time across different regions or around the world. It will give you great insight into your website.
You can also integrate it with hundreds of different services, like Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, Heroku, and more.
One thing a lot of people experience is that they don’t know when their disk space is getting full. This is also covered by this little helper. It lets you know when your disk space or even server memory is running low. That way you don’t have to lose sleep and overthink it.
Site is down, but why?
Let’s hope that you have never experienced the situation of your site being down, but you just came across this article and wanted to read it in order to have some insight in case it happens to you.
But experiencing it and having no clue of what went wrong, is a real buzz kill. You will just stumble around and maybe do something that you will regret later, but it won’t give you an answer. And you need to have an answer so that you can prevent the situation from happening again, and because you want to fix it, of course.
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered here. A handsome devil like Better Uptime is a real game-changer in this aspect.
This tool has an incident section where you can see the whole history of an incident. You will get the whole list of things that went wrong, and you won’t have to look any further. It is all in one dashboard.
It will provide you with details such as, what caused the site to crash, how long was your site down, when did the downtime start, and who was the person on call at that particular time. Having all these pieces of information in just one dashboard is a true time-saver.
Better Uptime gives you a great overview of the issues, with all the details, so that you are prepared for the next time they happen. You also have the option to view more info about the problem and see the whole timeline of it. It will show you the problem, who was on call, and the screenshot it took.
Remember when we said that it is terrible if the site is down for even an hour? That won’t happen ever again if you have this little gem.
You can configure this tool to contact a person via SMS, email, or call, to notify them that the site is down. Not just that, you can also define a time frame in which they need to respond, otherwise, someone else will be contacted.
You can import an on-call calendar using your favorite calendar app so that you can put your team members on rotation. It is that easy. And changing the on-call calendar is simple.
The person that was notified about the incident can acknowledge that there was a problem with just one click so that it doesn’t alert the whole team. It is bad when the site goes down, and you need to deal with it, but it is even worse when you are trying to solve the issue, and the whole team that just woke up is on your back.
When a person fixes the issue, he/she can quickly write a post-mortem on what caused the problem and how it was fixed. So that the whole team has all the pieces of information necessary for future reference.
Let your visitors know
There will always be some visitors that will stumble across your page when it is down – even if it is down only for 5 minutes. Still, you don’t want them to think that you are irresponsible and not professional, right? That’s why you need a status page.
Notifying your visitors about site downtime is just as important as notifying your team. Don’t keep them guessing – let them know! You can create some sleek status pages within minutes. Having your customers know that you are taking care of your site is a big plus and a must!
Better Uptime lets you do that, and it is just the tip of the iceberg. It also supports fast HTTP(s) checks up to 30 seconds from 4 regions. The regions in question are North and South America, Europe, and Australia.
They also make sure that you never experience losing a database backup with their option “Heartbeat monitor” that is dedicated to your background jobs and CRON scripts.
Conclusion
After reading this article, I hope that you realize that having a tool for when your site goes down is a must. But not just any tool. You need a tool that combines uptime monitoring, incident management, and a public status page. Luckily, there is a tool that combines all that – Better Uptime.
As we explained throughout the article, it will help you significantly with info about your site problems.
Having details on what went wrong, at what time, how long it lasted, and everything related to an incident is just amazing. It will help you solve the problems quicker.
So, don’t be shy, use Better Uptime to your advantage, and be prepared if your site goes down. Be a proud owner of a site that fixes its problems fast, and doesn’t keep its customers waiting at any moment.