MMMeeja

We all know that you should use visitor analysis tools like Google Analytics to investigate how visitors use your website, but there are a couple of more fundamental issues that need monitoring too.

This post explores those issues and shows two free services that provide simple, comprehensive solutions.

Is My Website Available?

Your web host may advertise 99.9% uptime but do you know whether they are actually delivering?

If you run an international business you need to check that your site can be read from all the major continents, even if you don’t, you need third-party verification if your ISP provides both hosting and your internet connection.

Mon.itor.us

This great free service will monitor a number of URLs and send you emails if one of them becomes unavailable for a period. They also send a monthly report on the availability of your sites.

Using this method shows that MMMeeja’s various sites get about 99.7% uptime - not great at first glance. However, since the top ten hosting providers provide between 99.5 to 99.8% uptime according to Mon.itor.us statistics, I don’t think that is bad at all.

The emailed reports are great, but even better value is provided by the Mon.itor.us dashboard. It provides useful graphs and statistics about the pages you monitor. There is a paid service too, providing robust, enterprise-level monitoring for mission critical websites.

Inursite

Another service that is incredibly useful, especially for fast changing sites like blogs, is Inursite.

Don’t be fooled by the unstyled web page, this service is delivered via RSS into your feed reader. You get an update each day with as simple “PASS” or “FAIL” for each of URL you monitor. It is then up to you to go to the W3C’s HTML Validator to find out why a particular site has failed.

I am sure that Inursite will be monetised and turned into a viable business before long, but for now it provides an excellent early warning of any invalid markup that creeps into your pages.

Google Alerts

Finally, Google Alerts provides a great way to keep up with what others are saying about your site or brand.

This is one of the great unsung tools from Google but I consider it to be vital. By setting up alerts for your site URL and name, you get daily email listing any newly indexed pages that refer to your site. Simple, but so useful.