SiteUptime Features

Uptime Monitoring: Introducing the New SiteUptime API

uptime monitoring

Downtime is a downer. Downtime can cost a business up to $1000 a minute.

And while downtime is unavoidable due to maintenance or cyber attacks, having the right information can keep your site running smoothly 99.999% of the time.

Enter uptime monitoring.

Uptime monitoring can be a lifesaver. And in the next few paragraphs, we’re going to show you how the new SiteUptime API can help keep your website secure from unnecessary downtime.

Why You Need Uptime Monitoring

Ignoring the available data from your website is like not watching your bank account.

You might move along with your plans and find yourself in a sticky situation.

You could be off resting on your laurels while all your customers and leads go to your competitor.

This means no conversions and certainly no money in your pocket.

Even at 99.9% uptime, your business could lose $109,500 in a year. And if you own a larger business, this could mean more than one million in lost dollars over a year.

But how else can downtime affect your website? Let’s take a look.

1. Downtime Can Affect Your SERPs

Although Matt Cuts once claimed a little bit of downtime won’t hurt, anything more than a day of downtime will.

Since Matt Cutts made that famous claim, Google bots became more efficient. While it used to take bots hours to days to find your site, Google now crawls websites on a regular basis.

While Google now refuses to make statements about how downtime affects SERPs, webmasters can work backward from what they observe.

And what they observe tells a story of woe. Web sites that experience downtime sees their rankings drop by 12 places in a few hours.

And sometimes this causes Google to check other signals and a website might drop even further in the SERPs.

Enough evidence exists. It all points to downtime really affecting your SERPs.

How Does Uptime Monitoring Mitigate This?

Uptime monitoring will give you live updates on your site downtime.

Knowing immediately when your site goes down means you can get it back up and running within the hour. You can quickly contact your server or troubleshoot the problem.

2. Downtime Will Change Your Reputation

Once you break someone’s trust it’s extremely difficult to regain it.

Sony found this out the hard way back in 2014 when their user data was hacked and they completely lost face with their customer base.

They’re now known as the company that let’s people hack them. And it took them several years to recover from the damage.

While downtime doesn’t affect your reputation as drastically as a major cyber attack and customer data leak, you won’t walk away without a tarnished reputation.

And once your reputation is tarnished, you may not get a chance to make-up with certain customers. You will possibly have to find new leads and new customers and rebuild from there.

How Does Uptime Monitoring Mitigate This?

You can know about downtime before your customers and potential leads do.

Instant knowledge of downtime gives you the opportunity to fix a problem before it’s evident to the world.

And if it’s something you can’t fix immediately, you can use social media to communicate with customers about a problem.

This allows you to positively manage your reputation as a company. Being honest about what’s going on with your site will increase the trust your customers have in you and your business.

You can also explain a problem before anyone has a chance to complain.

One of the biggest reputation killers on the internet today is the bad review. And with the openness and coldness of social media, people are more willing to public complain about a company now than ever before.

You can avoid this pitfall by knowing about downtime immediately.

3. Downtime Isn’t The Only Culprit

Uptime monitoring doesn’t just monitor downtime.

A slow website is another factor that could affect your conversion rate and your bounce rate and your reputation all at once.

Count four seconds. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand.

No, we aren’t playing hide and seek, we’re counting how long it takes a user to give up on your slow website.

25% of users abandon a website after four seconds of waiting and 50% jump ship after ten seconds.

And not only will website speed affect your bounce rate, it will affect your SERPs as well.

Google expects websites to be lightning fast. And slow load times mean a drop in rankings.

And a drop in ranking means a loss of visibility. And a loss of visibility means little to no traffic and very few leads.

How Does Uptime Monitoring Mitigate This?

Uptime monitoring gives you real-time data on website speed. You can also access data on what might be causing slow speeds.

In essence, uptime monitoring keeps the service you utilize accountable for their server speeds.

And if you find your server is the problem, migrate to a new one.

You should not tolerate a slow server. There is no excuse for slow speeds outside of software or website design.

Uptime monitoring can also help identify software and web design problems. These are easily fixed issues. And fixing them will increase your website speed.

Why Is The New SiteUptime API Your Best Bet?

Some of the best deals are all-in-one packages. For physical packaging, it’s cheaper to clump products together and use one package.

For digital products, it’s just utterly convenient for the client.

With the new SiteUptime API, you add multiple monitors. This allows you to monitor multiple uptime statistics at once in real-time.

It uses Modern REST+JSON and that’s free with all standard and pro accounts.

with SiteUptime API, you can remotely manage your monitors. No longer will you have to be local to change your settings and add or remove or edit monitors.

This API also allows you to build on top of your existing control panels. If you don’t want to give up your other control panels, adding SiteUptime is extremely simple.

If you’re looking for a great uptime monitoring system to add to your website, check out our SiteUptime demo right now.

 

How to Send Email Notifications of Website Down and Uptime

email notifications

It’s a fact of the Internet that your website will go down on occasion. Whether it’s on purpose, or the fault of your host provider, eventually you’ll find yourself staring at 404 or 504 errors.

Instead of trying to fight the inevitable, it’s much more important to let your users know what’s going on.

Internet users are a fickle bunch. They don’t like waiting and won’t tolerate website downtime without some sort explanation.

When ESPN’s fantasy football website went down for the start of the 2016/2017 season, users voiced their displeasure (read: extreme anger) on Twitter.

Fantasy football is a big deal to some, but it’s nothing compared to managing a business where client’s bank accounts depend on your website.

The outrage from your specific demographic is liable to far exceed ESPN’s downed fantasy website.

An excellent way to notify your users of any website downtime is using simple email notifications.

Almost everyone has a smartphone that constantly pushes email to their pocket. Users can easily see the email, and acknowledge that your website is down.

Just like that, outrage averted.

Professional Monitoring Services

We’ll cut right to the case. Hiring a professional website monitoring service is the best way to ensure your customers know about downtime.

If your company has a dedicated IT guy that can write up a program to handle downtime monitoring, that’s great. Take advantage of him.

However, most website owners, and even large hosting companies, have other priorities. Coding a custom platform takes time and money.

Though hiring a professional service isn’t just about picking any old service and letting them have at your website.

You as the webmaster needs to decide how you’d like the monitoring setup.

Namely, what triggers email notifications? What will the emails say? Who receives these emails?

When Should Email Notifications Send

Website monitoring emails notifications should send out immediately after your website goes down.

Any reputable monitoring software will push these emails out as soon as possible.

These random errors are likely your 404 errors, where downtime could vary based on the problem.

This means you need to get the message out fast, and also let customers know as much information as possible.

With any luck, your monitoring program will figure out the problem quickly, and then shoot another optional email letting clients know the expected downtime.

Scheduled Updates

There will come a day when you have to take your website down for scheduled maintenance.

It’s annoying, but makes your site better in the long run.

Customers should know about maintenance well before it happens. If they don’t know until they see your redirect message, it’s far too late.

An excellent example of this predicament is online banking. There are some banks that only notify of scheduled maintenance through a brief homepage message.

As you can imagine, this doesn’t help at all for the people who don’t visit the website until they need to make a transaction.

Car payment due today? Should have visited our website yesterday to see our maintenance message.

Obviously, this isn’t the best way to run a business. It’s so much easier to push out email notifications announcing downtime to users.

A simple, “We’re taking our website offline next week at 5:50-7:50 pm for maintenance,” works perfectly fine.

It’s also not a bad idea to include what your maintenance actually does. People are more likely to accept (not get mad) updates that help their user experience.

Oh, and email reminders can also work well here. An email notification 24 before the downtime helps refresh people’s memory.

Who To Email?

Downtime emails should go out to the entirety of your email list.

Include everyone who’s ever voluntarily signed up for your email contact.

If someone gave out their email to your company, it’s likely they’re interested in your product.

If they’re interested in your product, it’s only logical that they would like to know when and for how long your website is down.

Even if you’re only running a personal website, if people signed up for your email list, email them!

For all of the promotional emails you send to your potential customers, an alert about website downtime will show them they’re worth more than dollar signs.

It also doesn’t hurt to set aside a special list of people who receive customized emails.

These are your high-value clients who need instant access to your company at all times.

Send them special emails that include your phone number and other contact information in case they need something while your website is down.

How Many Emails Is Too Many?

Your customers need information about your website downtime. We’ve established that this much is true.

However, what’s the limit? When do friendly informative emails become annoying “spam?”

It’s a question that gets asked over and over again, and one where there isn’t a real concrete answer.

What we do know, is that studies have linked high email volume and email “pressure” (constant email notifications) to high-stress levels.

This isn’t something you want to force on your customers. Your website needs to distance itself from stress at all costs.

If people are opening your emails and thinking, “NOT AGAIN. ANOTHER EMAIL,” you’re in for trouble.

We’d suggest sending emails when your website goes down, and again when it comes back online. Reminder emails are still ok for scheduled maintenance.

You might consider only emailing people who opt into a so-called “downtime” email list.

Opt-in lists are a double edge sword, as one day someone may not want to receive your email notifications, while the next they might.

Either way, don’t bombard people with emails.

Sending email notifications for uptime and downtime are essential parts of running a website. Customers deserve to know what’s happening with your site and why.

While it’s possible to handle this on your own, it’s much easier (and more efficient) to hire a professional monitoring service.

Most offer full monitoring suites that also integrate email notifications. Just pick what you want to say, and when you want to say it.

Your customers will thank you later (probably in sales).

Re-Introducing, Our Website Monitoring Webhook

If you have been with SiteUptime for awhile, you have probably stumbled upon a few of our “surprise features” while working in your control panel. These are big/small/medium-sized system enhancements that we scope, develop, test, and deploy without really telling anyone.

One of these surprise features is our Website Monitoring Webhook which went live months ago, but was never properly introduced.

This user-requested functionality allows you to specify the URL of a script where we can send data when an event occurs with one of your monitors. You can use it to customize your email routing, trigger an event in your system, switch to a backup, etc.

Learn More >