Monitor Your Web Server Ping, Uptime, and Downtime
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Here is a simple guide on setting up a status and response time check for your website.
Step 1
Set up a blank or very basic HTML file somewhere on your site/server. This will be the file that the monitoring program will ping to determine your server's response time and status. It is important to use an un-used file, so that the pings don't mess with your analytics.
Step 2
Sign up at Pingdom or another free 3rd party server monitoring site. Pingdom allows you to create a status check for one server for free, which is probably all you'll need. Set up the check for the URL to the un-used file you created in step one.
Depending on the monitoring program, you may have a choice of resolution for the check. For example, you can have the program check your server every minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, etc. How detailed of a report you want will affect your choice. 5 minutes is probably sufficient if you're just curious about overall downtime or response time and do not need to act on individual downtime events.
Step 3
You're done. Give it some time for results to accrue.