Web Design Development Articles

There are no professionals who can sit and monitor their website’s performance around the clock…it just isn’t possible. So, how do you know when your website is experiencing downtime or other issues that prevent visitors from reaching it?

There are many services now available for anyone who needs to keep an eye on their site. The question for many professionals is usually “I pay for a web hosting service, won’t they let me know?” Unfortunately the answer to that question is “no”. Most web hosting providers just don’t have the ability to monitor the thousands of pages they are hosting. They do provide all kinds of troubleshooting and support for customers experiencing difficulties, but they cannot guarantee round the clock uptime.

While many web hosting providers are beginning to make some ironclad guarantees around uptime, such as a 99.9% guarantee, not all are ready to make such statements. This is the reason so many businesses utilize one of the monitoring services. These are available as free and paid plans, but the benefits from all of them are great.

Generally, the services will use some sort of program or scripting to gauge the function of the site. If at any time a site goes down the monitoring service will alert the website owner, which can be done via email, cell phone or any other preferred contact method. They work in a variety of ways, but most measure the status of an account holder’s site approximately every ten minutes or less. Most make it easy to monitor numerous sites and all have multiple locations to prevent a failure of service should any one monitoring area go down.

What exactly do the monitoring services look for? Generally, they are making sure that your website is never unavailable. While they will not be able to fix things, they will let you know instantly if the site is down. Even a few hours without service can add up to wasted dollars in advertising and loss of sales. This means that with an email or telephone call you can get in touch with your web hosting company to get the problems resolved and the site operational.

Additionally, using a monitoring service also lets a website owner know if their hosting provider is meeting the terms of their contract, and establishes a valid paper trail to prove when or if the provider is in the wrong. This can help to get a refund on fees if the service falls below its guaranteed uptimes.

There are a handful of reasons that anyone will opt to change web hosting providers. Some will find a better deal with another company, some will find that the original server is not meeting the terms of their contract, and others need to increase the size of their site and are choosing a new provider.

These, and many other factors, are valid reasons for changing web hosts, but it is important to remember that a shift in servers can translate to a significant amount of “downtime”, or a period when your site is unavailable. While this instantly means a loss of communication with current customers it also means a loss of potential new customers and money.

So, how do you change web hosts without any downtime? Well, the answer requires a few considerations:

· Time
· Organization
· Effort

Time - when you have decided that you need to shift from one provider to another it is critical to remember that your original host may not be happy with your decision. It is advisable to wait to let the current hosting service know of your decision to terminate service until all files have been transferred and the new site is fully operational. Why the secrecy? There are many reasons, but the most important is that they may end your service at the moment you make the call. This could mean a loss of data and files, an inability for customers and visitors to find your site and worse it could mean a loss of credibility and money.

Organization - once you have made the choice to change web hosting providers and have located your new service it is time to begin transferring and copying all of the files from your original server. You should all ready be making all changes on your own equipment and then posting them, usually via FTP, to the server. If not you will need to begin doing this in order to always have the hard copy files on your own equipment. Once everything is copied you can go ahead and test the site operationally.

Effort - You may run into a few issues with files or you may find that you need to perform a few annoying tasks in addition to shifting files. Like what? You may need to remove your domain name from the original server, who may serve as the registrar, in order to avoid forwarding fees. You may need to address all of the code on your site to ensure the old URLs are not embedded.

With some planning and hard work you will not experience any downtime, but ultimately the responsibility is on your shoulders.