eCommerce Blog

Yes, consider this a public service announcement for all of you website owners running your site on any kind of server – that even includes you dedicated server hogs. How many of you can say that you’ve never pulled up the URL to your site only to find it down? And of course, this usually happens at the worst time – at a conference, when showing a colleague, or during an all important business meeting! Hosting can be a mixed bag, sometimes you see good results with little outage, and sometimes, you’re not so lucky. I’m not going to make this into a hosting rant, because that could take a while.

Instead, I want to state that this does happen, to pretty much everyone, at some point in time. But being able to know how often it happens, and when it happens, can make a big difference in being down for minutes, or hours, or even days. If you’ve been in that scenario before, when you try to pull up the site, and you get the dreaded “Couldn’t Find Server” error, you instantly think that it has to be something with the internet connection, so you try another site – and of course it works. So you think, well, maybe that one was cached, let’s try another, and boom, there it is. At this point you begin to think that in may indeed be your site, so you try again, hitting refresh repeatedly to determine if its just a temporary glitch or a full blown site meltdown. Reality starts to set in, and you start to panic, and questions race through your mind – why is the site down? How long has it been down? Does my host know what’s going on?

After collecting yourself, you open a trouble ticket with the host’s service desk (via phone or email) notifying them of the issue, and within minutes, they wave their magic wand and the site is all happy again. Sound familiar? If not, consider yourself lucky. For those of us that have been faced with this scenario, we all know how strenuous it can be, and swear up and down that you’re going to get a new host and migrate the site, but weeks go by without a problem (as far as you know), and you forget about it. The problem is, that you may only be catching this part of the time, and unless you’re constantly checking your site, you’re going to have no idea exactly how often, and for how long this happens.

The reality is, this is a problem most, if not all, of us have to face. Server technology is not 100% (despite what most SLAs would leave you to believe) and temporary outages are considered to be expected to some extent. So what’s the answer? Well, there really isn’t one, but what we can do is minimize the impact these outages have by monitoring our site and being quick on the draw when notifying our hosting provider. Because what’s even more disturbing is that in most cases, the site will be out until we notify the support department, almost as if they have no idea that your site is down. I’ve yet to find a host that pro actively identifies and fixes problems before I find them – then again, if I did I wouldn’t even know it then would I.

There’s a number of products on the market that will monitor your website uptime for you, some of which are free, most of which are not. The prices of these can vary greatly as well, and typically incur a monthly charge. We evaluated a number of these solutions and really like what we see in a product called Pingdom. It allows you setup a number of different monitoring types, including web checks, network checks, and even email checks. It not only allows you to monitor the uptime, but also the response rates and provides you an interface to report on the data that it collects.

But in specific regard to the uptime, you can define “alerts” that can be sent via email or SMS text message to your cell phone when your site goes down. I’d recommend creating a separate mailbox for these alerts and placing a high priority on them (ie. if you have a blackberry, setup that mailbox to alert you loudly when an email is received) so that when you are alerted of your site being down, you can quickly take action.

The alerts alone provide something that everyone managing an eCommerce store should absolutely have – but in addition the data being collected by Pingdom allows you to evaluate the hosting environment that you’re in. If your site constantly fails its check – something of which you may not have been aware of previously – or if it tends to have a laggish response rate, you’ll know its time to find a better host or get to the root of these problems.

Your eCommerce site is a mission critical system – and as such – its uptime is a vital aspect of your business. Every little outage will have an impact not only on your sales today – but also on your sales tomorrow. We all know the statistics, if someone has a reason for not buying something on your site now (as in it being down or even worse going down while they are trying to buy something) probability has it that they will never return. Tools like Pingdom provide you the capabilities to monitor your site at all times (even when you’re sleeping) and allow you to react quickly to minimize the impact. If you find yourself receiving updates frequently, you do need to evaluate your hosting situation because ideally, you won’t need a tool like this at all, but for most of us – it’s a necessary evil.

[NOTE: This article isn't intended to be a recommendation for Pingdom, nor is it a solicited review. During our evaluation of the software we determined that is was a good example of a website monitoring solution and chose to use it as an example in our article. As mentioned there are many others out there and I welcome any feedback on them as well.]

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under eCommerce Business Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.