This Webpage Is Not Available

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Are you aware your website is down?

Seeing the words, “This webpage is not available” can be alarming when you visit your own website. The first thing you ask yourself is, “what happened?” The second thing you ask yourself, “how long has it been down?”

If you’re like most normal business people, you don’t check your website. You assume it’s up and running. After all, you paid a website developer a lot of money for it. You assume they’re checking it for you, right?

Well, wrong. Interestingly, the website development community takes a negative attitude of, “you only paid us to build it”. Even when a developer hosts your site on their server, they still don’t check for downtime until a client complains. And how often do clients check their own websites?

So last night, I wanted to promote my friend’s business to my Facebook followers. I went to her website to copy the URL, except I got the following screen…

this webpage is not availableI texted her to let her know her website was down. She responded, not knowing it had been down, however indicated that she had hired another website developer a couple of months ago. Minutes later, she texted again to say that she had messaged her developer, and was told the site had been moved to another server, and that if I deleted my cache, it would refresh.

Well, that answer didn’t make sense to me. I hadn’t visited her website in the past 12 months, and my laptop is not that old. But moreover, if the website was moved as much as two months ago, my ISP would have refreshed its DNS cache by then too.

Sure enough, she texted me again saying that she had just asked a couple of other friends to visit her site, and they confirmed it was down.

So.

How long has her site been down? How many potential customers has she lost? Has this affected her ranking on Google Search?

There are actually are some notification services that monitor websites for downtime. DownNotifier (free), ServiceUptime (free), and Pingability (paid) are examples.

Another effortless way to check your website is to make it the default home page of your browser.

When we sell a website development project, we include website monitoring. If your website goes down for any reason, we will be notified right away, and we’ll be on top of it, even if the website is not hosted on our server.

Shouldn’t your website developer be able to do at least that?

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