A few weeks ago, a client Web site disappeared. It happens: in the past, other clients have occasionally lost their sites, for reasons ranging from hosting hard disk failures to various human errors. (In this client’s case, they hadn’t renewed the domain name, so the site was still there, but the URL pointing to it had disappeared.)
The problem is, you’re usually the last to know that your site is down. Maybe a client calls and asks if you’re still in business, or your accountant wonders why there were no sales last week.
An easy solution is to use an outside monitoring service. It’ll ping your site periodically, and if it gets no response, you’ll get an alert. I’ve started using mon.itor.us for a few Web sites. It has a lot of features, including a pay service for more advanced monitoring, but the basics are pretty easy and free.
