By Nick Stevens / Published on June 7th, 2008 / Internet Marketing
But there is one crucial factor you must take into consideration...
How do you know that your site is always up and running?
You see, if visitors try to view your site and their browsers can't load it they think that this site no longer exists and they'll move on to one of your competitors. So, you can kiss goodbye to your dreams for a successful online presence.
Naturally, if your website is hosted in a server in your place, then you can always be sure that it is up and running. But in most cases, web hosting plans are using shared servers located elsewhere in another city even in other country.
It's not possible to load your site every hour just to check if it is running? You can do it the hours you spend online but how can you check it during the time you sleep or you are on vacations.
One solution is to use a script in a second site of yours in a different server who will check every 30 minutes if your site is up. Of course in this case you must run the same script from the first website as well just to make sure that your second site is also up.
That solution will cost you some extra money, because you have to pay for a second domain name and a second webhost.
But, there is another solution, more professional who will cost you nothing...
You can use a service who can check your website status frequently.
Such a service at zero cost is the siteuptime.com.
Once you create a free account you can monitor up to 5 websites. This service checks every 30 minutes if your sites are up and running and if some of them are not they send a notification email informing you which of your sites is down. Now when the site is up again they send you a second email to inform you about that.
With this method, you can check if your webhost is facing downtime problems and ask them about it, make a complain, even cancel your account with them and sign up with a more reliable webhost.
Nick Stevens
http://www.powersoftwaretools.com
About the author:
Nick Stevens is the publisher of the free weekly rich-info newsletter about internet marketing software and tools for internet business owners and webmasters. To sign-up to the "Power Software Tools Ezine" go to
http://www.powersoftwaretools.com/t.php?t=ezine
As a bonus you'll get FREE access to our Members Area where you can find software you can use for yourself, giveaway or even resell.