Website Monitoring

Website monitoring for uptime and traffic

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Website Monitoring for Uptime and Traffic

Monitor website for Uptime

There are many web services which will monitor a website for availability or uptime. They access your site periodically and let you know if they find it unavailable. If you want frequent checks (every minute) you have to pay a monthly fee, but you can get it monitored every 10 or 15 minutes for free.

If they find your site unavailable, these monitoring services will send you an email, and another email when it comes up again. (With paid-for monitoring services you can have an SMS.)

Website monitoring services (for uptime) are useful if you have doubts or concerns about your host's ability to keep your site available at all times.

Monitor website for Traffic

It's useful for a website owner to monitor the traffic to her site, and look at her website statistics every so often. Several website statistics services are available.

Your hosting company maintains a log of all "hits" to each website. This log file is the raw material that website traffic statistics packages will analyze. Some of these analysis packages are free, some are not.

Free statistics, based on that log file, are often provided by your hosting company. They enable you to answer questions like these:

How many visitors did my site receive yesterday (or this month)?
Which countries did my visitors come from?
How many visitors came from each search engine?
What search phrases did my visitors use to find my site?
Which websites referred visitors to my site?
How many pages do my visitors look at, on average?
How long do visitors stay on my site, on average?
Which pages of the website did my visitors land on?
Which pages of the website did my visitors exit from?
How many viewings (page views) did each web page enjoy?
What operating systems and browsers were my visitors using?

Why monitor website traffic statistics?

One reason for monitoring website statistics is so that you can see the effect on your traffic patterns of any change you make to your site.

You may also change your website specifically to attract more visitors, or to encourage them to stay longer on your site, or view more pages. Then by monitoring your statistics you can see how successful those changes were.

You will probably want to build your traffic, either to increase your influence or your income. Monitoring your traffic statistics shows you how well you're doing.

Script-based statistical services for website monitoring

There is another type of website monitoring service which does not rely on your host's log file for its information. To use these services, you must include a script within your HTML code, on every web page.

The script causes information to be sent to the website monitoring service whenever a visitor requests a page from your site. So the monitoring service knows what web page/s each visitor is viewing. They analyze the information and report on it to you.

Some website monitoring services are paid for, others are free.

The best-known free website monitoring service is Google Analytics.

This brings us to the end of our tutorial on website monitoring, as well as the Publishing section of our course. We are ready to turn our attention to the art and science of promoting a website. In our first tutorial we look at search engines...

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Links / Resources

Free online website availability checkers:

Montastic

Binary Canary

Killer Webstats

Hit: A request for a website file, e.g. from a browser.

Website analysis software (web log-based):

Analog

AWstats

AlterWind

Webalizer

A useful article on Web Analytics and the differences between log-based and script-based website monitoring:

Wikipedia: Web analytics

Script-based website monitoring services:

Google Analytics

Quantcast

StatCounter

WebSTAT

More links:

Software-Pointers: Links to Traffic Analysis Tools

Publish: Website Monitoring Top Prev Next: Search Engines

Website monitoring - What you can measure you can manage