How to Monitor Blog Downtime

Your traffic may be staggering as a result of your blog’s downtime even without your notice. You cannot monitor your blog 24/7 and sometimes the reasons for your blog downtime may not be yours. The hosting server may go down and your site will go offline and becomes inaccessible which could lead to revenue loss.

But if you have a quick and easy way of knowing when your blog goes down, you can be able to fix up the problem quickly and get it running again. This article will teach you how you can monitor blog downtime with Google Docs so as to know when your blog is down. You will also receive an email or SMS alert anytime your site goes offline.

Monitor Blog Downtime with Google Docs:

Visit Google Docs and sign in, then click here to create a copy of the Google Spreadsheet into your Google Drive account.

Edit the document by clicking on the cells to replace the texts, add the URL or URLS as the case may be that you want to monitor in cell B2. You can separate multiple domains with the comma (,).

Add your email address on the next row (Cell B3) and change the No to Yes if you want to receive SMS alert anytime your blog goes offline. Click here to read how you can register your phone number on the doc if you haven’t already added your phone number to Google Calendar.

After you must have filled all the required fields in the form, click on the Website Monitor menu to reveal the hidden menu.

Select “Initialize” and a pop up will require you to authorize the script as shown below.

After the authorization, go back to the Website Monitor menu and select “Start” to begin monitoring your blog downtime. Now you can close the doc.

There are also a lot of free web monitoring tools I have used in the past to monitor my blog’s uptime/downtime but the problem is that most of them are limited services that requires an upgrade for premium services. Some of them includes the following;

Mon.Itor.Us – Mon-Itor.Us only monitors more than 120,000 websites and also offers services like Internal monitoring and visitors tracking.

Site Uptime – Monitors your website every 30 mins and notifies you via email and SMS once it goes offline.

Site 24×7 – Site 24 x 7 is yet another tool used to monitor blog downtime.

Now the Google Docs will begin to monitor when your website is offline and you will receive an email and SMS alert as the case may be whenever such event happens.

I hope you find this tool very useful in monitoring your web hosting’s performance because downtime affects your site in a lot of ways and just as your visitors won’t like to experience downtime on your blog, search engines don’t as well. With this tool you can understand how good your web hosting company is or if you have a need to change to another. Drop your comments or questions from the comment form below, remember to subscribe to my RSS.

Thanks to Amit Agarwal for providing the script.