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short tech post: enhanced uptime monitoring with Pingdom

October 9, 2020

written by
Rex Vokey

is your site up?

Quick, go check since you’re thinking about it. But you can’t be checking it all the time, right? No website, even the big boys like Google and Amazon have 100% uptime. Besides the horrible user experience of wanting to buy that bedazzled mask and finding the site down, experts say the average revenue loss is $21k for a single hour of downtime. Which means downtime = less money in your pocket.  That’s why we monitor all of our clients’ websites with Pingdom.  No, we’re not shilling for them (but maybe we should) because it’s the service we use to make sure we know first if our client’s sites go down.

but is your site really, really up?

By default, Pingdom (and other services) only check to see that the web server responded with a “200 OK” response.  What if the page loads, but it’s blank, or something went wrong with the JavaScript execution while it was loading?  Just getting a response that the page loaded isn’t going to work.  There are options to do better.

enhanced uptime monitoring.

What we’ve decided to do as a start for all of our newer builds is to have certain classes that are added to HTML elements on the page as loading progresses.  We found a handy little option in Pingdom’s monitoring service that can check to see if a given string exists in the HTML.  Now, we can add a check for one of the classes we add toward the end of our page load process.  Voila!  We now have enhanced uptime monitoring and we now know if that page is loading correctly.

There are a zillion and one ways to check if your site is up, the worst of all is to just manually check. We recommend always signing up for a service at the very least. And if you have us on your side, we’ll not only check it when we get the alert….we can find the cause, too.