Xavier Media®

It doesn't matter if you use your site for blogging, selling stuff or selling your knowledge (for example consulting) every second your site is down or unreachable can be costly for you. So how do you know how often people can't access your site?

You can of course trust your web hosting company's 99.99% uptime guarantee and hope it's completely true from anywhere in the world where you're visitors are located, or you could manually check your site daily to see if you can access it.

Both these options aren't that good because you're not getting the full picture. Uptime is different depending on where in the world you, your visitors and your server is located. As an example your server may be up and running, but people in for example Australia can't access it because of problems with the connection between Australia and your server. Some other times the server may seem slow to you, but that may just be problems with your own ISP.

The solution to this is to test your server connection from various places all around the world at different times of the day. If you do it manually it's almost impossible, but luckily Mon.itor.us got a service that will help you.

Mon.itor.us got both a free and a paid service with a few more test locations.  It doesn't matter if you use the free or the paid service, it's still really easy to use and you get nice graphs of your web sites performance. To start testing you just sign up for an account and fill in the site URL and what to test. You can also select from where you would like to test. They've just recently added two new test locations so now you can test from Europe (Germany) and USA using both your free and paid account. If you have a paid account you can of course also test from Australia, Panama, Brazil, UK and China.

This is a sample graph where you can see the load time from Europe (Germany) and USA for www.entrecard.com. As you can see on the graph there where some slower access times for the server about at 5-6 in the morning if you where surfing from Europe, but visitors from USA didn't notice this at all. Visitors from USA got slower access times at about 10-11 instead.

If you have visitors from all around the world you will easily see if you need to setup multiple servers in various countries close to your visitors or if just a server in USA is enough. In the Entrecard case a server in both USA and Europe could have useful.

Mon.itor.us will send you a weekly report showing how your sites have performed and how much uptime you've had and you can test much more then just HTTP (web surfing) like DNS and ping too. This way you can figure out if you need a new web server or just have to switch DNS servers.

Check out Mon.itor.us for all their features and prices for the premium service.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.