For many webmasters the amount of server uptime that they experience from a hosting company is the biggest if not the only factor that really matters. Yes, after all if your website is down often, then you are losing traffic and your visitors are not able to access your site and this can become a huge problem. If you are having problems deciding if you are ready to switch hosting companies or not, you may want to take advantage of a free website monitoring service to find out how much downtime you are really experiencing. Since you the webmaster, look at your site more often than probably any other visitor, so it is natural if there is any downtime at all that it seems like a lot. This is just one reason to use an external tool to check out web site uptime.
Why Use Third Party Web Site Monitoring Services?
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Using an external website monitoring service can give you another view of any downtime that your website may be blocked. One thing that many webmasters may not be aware of is the fact that many shared hosting companies use a IP address filters to temporarily block possible website attacks. This sounds like a great security feature. However, if you are making many updates to a website and you are seeing intermittent connectivity issues, it may very well be your own web host who has blocked your connection. This has happened to me on more than one accession and this can be corrected with a simple email to your host requesting your IP address can be added to a white list. However, if you are not sure if it is on your side or theirs, using an external site monitoring service will tell you really quickly where the problem is.
What Type Of Information Will I Learn?
Most free web site monitoring services will show you more information that you really need. This is a good thing because you want to make sure you have all the data you need to make an educated decision especially if you are considering changing hosts. The biggest thing that you will want to look for here is any dropped connections or server time outs where the monitoring site was unable to connect to your domain. These are times when most likely nobody else would be able to see your website on the internet. So if you are sending traffic to your webpage during these times, your visitors are seeing nothing more than an error page.
Some monitoring services may display slow loading or intermittent connectivity issues to, these are not really outages, but still should raise a red flag to a web hosting client if you see them often. In most cases these connectivity issue mean that a host has oversold their server and are running really low on server resources.
What Should I Do If My Web Host Is Having Way To Much Downtime?
There really are a couple of good ways to go about correcting this problem. In most cases I would suggest talking to your hosting company first. They may be able to move your website to another server that is not over utilized or your contact may actually spur them into action to correct and issue that they were honestly unaware of. If they have an "up time guarantee" you may let them know that they are not keeping up with their promise and they may offer a discount or refund to you.
No matter what happens, many people do not want to have to check up on their web hosting company and will want to change hosts after problems like this. I don't blame you one bit, it is frustrating and you are paying customer, you should be able to get a good quality service for your money. So if you are ready to find a better web hosting company, here are couple of things you do not want to do.
Things Not To Do When Switching Hosting Companies
1. Do not tell your host that you are leaving or threaten them, this only leads to a worse situation than you are already in.
2. Do not stop paying for your current host until you have completed your move.
3. Do not hesitate to begin backing up your website or websites.
4. Don't Panic. There are many other great hosting companies out there.
5. Don't switch to an incompatible host. If you are currently using cpanel hosting, there are many other cpanel hosts that can make the switch instantly and painlessly for you, just look around and you will find that there are many compatible hosting companies no matter what hosting platform you are moving from.
Web Hosting Comparison and Uptime Monitors
