Web site monitoring

Update 17 Oct: I got issue with my hosting and I immediately got email that site is down and in one minute later I got notification that it is up again. So email notification is actually working.

If you have web site in internet sooner or later, you would like to setup monitoring to ensure that site is working and responsive.

Also, if you have site that has low number of visitors then on many hosting platforms your site will be unloaded after some inactive time. And usually startup time is quite long. Depending on hosting, software you are using and how big is your site startup speeds can be quite long. It can be 1-2 seconds long to up to 10 – 20 seconds. Even after 2 seconds Google bot can timeout and reject indexing that page.

I’m hosting ASP.NET Core web site on inexpensive hosting and they unload my site quite aggressively. I didn’t mind but soon I start seeing following errors in Google Search Console: “Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page.” Later I started to see that number of indexed pages start to decrease even they all have unique content. So, I decided to setup monitor to see my site response times and also to prevent web site unloading due to inactivity.

After some search I found https://uptimerobot.com. It is free, and it is completely what I need. Their web site is quite modern and nice looking. You can setup few monitors, you will see graphically uptime, I believe you will get alerts when something going bad (I still didn’t have this one my site). I can setup check every 5 minutes that more than enough for my case. The only one issue that for default HTTP monitor they use HEAD verb instead of GET and for some web frameworks it could be a problem like it was for mine. I wrote to support and in less than one minute I got response that there are aware of this issue and this will be adding this feature in next 2 weeks. In meantime I just used Keyword monitor.

And it works like a charm for last 2 days. My site is more responsive and I’m waiting for Google to re-index my site.

I hope it will help someone.