Is it how your monitoring service monitors your website?

Are you sure that the uptime report that your website monitoring service provides is accurate and really shows the real uptime of your website? Think again!

Almost every website owner or webmaster uses one or more monitoring utilities or services to monitor the uptime of their website for various reasons. Most common of these reasons to monitor a website are as follows:

• Pro-actively take care of a potential downtime situation.
• Prepare a website’s uptime report for the company.
• Check to see if the hosting company is meeting the already defined uptime SLAs.
• If the hosting company doesn’t meet uptime SLA, claim a refund as per the initial agreement.

There could be many more reasons due to which a webmaster is required to monitor their websites but then the real question is if the way a website is monitored reflects uptime in its true sense. Before you think harder, let us know what uptime really means, in a layman’s perspective.

Website uptime is the total time duration for which all the required functionalities of a website are available.

Now, if you want to monitor a website to check if it is online or not, the most simplest way to determine this would be by checking the HTTP status codes that the website will return upon requesting its URL. But what if the site uses a database to pull its content and the database itself is down but the site still returns HTTP status code 200? [HTTP status code 200 = OK]

If that happens, every website monitoring service that monitors such a website based on the HTTP status code it returns, will always report it to be up and available no matter even if a visitor can’t see anything on the site. This happened recently with one of my blog wherein the database was hung but the homepage was somehow returning a http status code 200.

I immediately opened an urgent ticket with my hosting company and the blog was back up, really up, in 30 mins.

I highly recommend that you check your website monitoring service and also find out how they determine the availability of your website. If your site earns you hundreds or thousands of dollars every month and ranks high for your targeted keywords, you don’t want to take chances with your website monitoring. Do you?