Monitoring

UptimeRobot is a long-established, stable, and full-featured website status monitoring service. Once you set it up, UptimeRobot periodically checks whether your site is online. This matters a great deal to site owners. Imagine you update your server and the site breaks, and you only notice three hours later. All the visitors during those three hours are lost! The free plan of UptimeRobot lets you monitor up to 50 targets, checking each one every five minutes. It supports four check types: HTTP Status, Keyword, Ping, and Port. When something goes wrong, UptimeRobot can notify you by SMS, email, Slack, WebHook, and many other channels. What matters even more to me is that UptimeRobot is well run and stable. I have been using it since 2011. ...

The TV hanging in our office has been sitting empty for a long time, and that is not a good use of it. So I recently started planning to show some important numbers on it, such as conversion rate, traffic, and live visitors. I originally thought a dashboard would be a simple request: two or three days of backend work to organize the data, then D3.js on the front end to draw the charts. Or I could make it even simpler and use custom reports in Google Analytics. But once I started researching, I found the problem was not so simple. Let me walk you through it. ...

Uptime Robot is an uptime monitoring service that I personally recommend. It checks whether your server is running and whether visitors can actually reach your website. Many services are similar to Uptime Robot, but most free uptime monitoring services only check every hour or less (in other words, how often the service checks your site). Uptime Robot's shortest interval is 5 minutes, and if it detects a problem with your site, it automatically sends you an email. Uptime Robot is free for now, but I'm not sure whether it will charge later......