Monitoring Your Blog or Website

Recently, things have not been the most stable over at the ol’ wife’s blog, House of Hepworths. It has gone down multiple times in the last week, resulting in two not very desirable outcomes: downtime and angry wife. A quick restart of MySQL has fixed the problem, but that is not a sustainable model. We host my wife’s blog over at HostGator (affiliate link). Ha ha – I crack myself up. Our blog has been unstable…go sign up at our awesome hosting provider through our affiliate link!

So anyway, over the past week we’ve had multiple outages where the database has gone down, thus rendering the website unavailable. Each time, I didn’t know how long it had actually been down until either a user, family member, or an angry wife called me on my cell phone (most of the time it was the latter). Don’t worry, Allison, you’re hot when you’re angry 😉 After it had gone down several times (and more importantly, a sufficient number of stink eyes from my wife), I decided to monitor the website and set up something to alert me as soon as it goes down. I thought of several ways I could achieve this: write my own script, implementing some open source monitoring software on the linux box at my house, or hire someone to stare at a screen and hit refresh every 5 minutes. At the end of the day, though, I decided to use Uptime Robot (not an affiliate link) to monitor my wife’s blog. There are actually quite a few services out there that you can sign up for. I found a good list on mashable here. UptimeRobot checks your website every 5 minutes to see if it is up. It can then be configured to email and/or SMS you if it detects that it is down. Within 5 minutes I had an account created, setup a few alert contacts, and started monitoring my wife’s blog. While I was at it, I setup monitoring for Geek Your Blog as well. It took me longer to write this short blog post than it did to setup monitoring. Now if it goes down in the future, I can immediately get it back up without any significant downtime.

So the monitoring was much needed, but it doesn’t solve the root problem of why my wife’s blog keeps going down. To be fair to HostGator, I think these outages could have been prevented by regular maintenance and some other performance improving measures that I could do. More to come soon on what I’m going to do to stabilize it and prevent outages in the first place.