By the way
If you find that your website has an unacceptable amount of downtime, you need a more reliable hosting company.
The best way to find a good web host is to ask for recommendations from other website owners.
If they are happy with their service they will usually be glad to direct more business to their host.
All web hosting companies that we recommend on this site are exceptionally reliable.
Dedicated server
For reliability and performance it's best to host your website on a dedicated server.
We recommend a good selection of attractively priced dedicated server web hosting options from a few reputable companies.
Website monitoring services
Website downtime can result in lost sales and customer frustration so your website needs to be available 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
There are technical problems beyond your control that can cause your website to go down or become sluggish. Server hardware and software can fail and your host may schedule downtime for maintenance.
Speedy recognition of failures is crucial for getting things back on track, and many companies offer website monitoring services that automatically alert you if your site goes down.
Hundreds of companies provide monitoring services. Some are free while others charge anywhere from $5 to $60 per month. The paid services offer more features and allow you to use the same service with several different sites.
Web monitoring is not done continuously and time intervals range from every 3 minutes to every hour with paid services offering the most comprehensive monitoring.
Monitoring works by sending an automatic request to your website and checking the server response. These requests are the same as a web browser makes and the response to the request determines whether the site is up or down. Requests are sent from different geographical locations to ensure the website availability from various parts of the world.
If the response code is OK (200, 301, 302, 401, 403) nothing happens and the monitoring software waits for the next scheduled check. If the response code indicates that the website is unreachable, a second check is performed a few seconds later from another location. There may be 3 or more of these checks before an alert is issued.
An alert can be sent to one or several email addresses or to a mobile device such as a pager or cell phone. This allows you to get in touch with your hosting company as soon as possible to ensure they are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it. Besides HTTP traffic, some website monitors can check also HTTPS, FTP, SMPT and POP3.
Besides downtime alerts these services can also provide useful statistics in the form of log files indicating how often a website goes down. This third-party information can be used to demand better service from your web host or a refund in the case of severe amounts of downtime.