Probably one of our longest outstanding feature requests has arrived – site uptime monitoring.
Knowing when your, or your clients’, sites are offline is critical to your business proposition. Most of us with business-critical websites use some form of website monitoring services and we’ve wanted to bring this en-mass into iControlWP for a long time.
Why? Because it aligns with our mission on all fronts, namely:
- it’s completely automated
- you don’t have to check, it’s done for you and then you’re notified when you need to be
- it’s 1-less thing for you to think about and provides you with metrics should you need to challenge your webhost
Why is uptime monitoring so important?
If your website is business critical, then you need to know the instant it isn’t available to potential customers.
No customers = no business.
Same goes for your clients. If their site is offline, or their web hosting is patchy, you need to know that too.
It’s pretty bad for reputation – there’s nothing worse than being offline. Sure, it happens to us all, but prolonged and repetitive outages are just plain bad for business.
But we know you don’t have the time or head-space to monitor this yourself. You might even be paying for another 3rd party service to do this monitoring already, but we want to consolidate important website tools like this under 1 roof. And this is a step direction.
What exactly do we monitor about your website?
We’re keeping it simple, for now. To need to know key facts about your website uptime and this is what we’re focusing on.
- When you connect a WordPress site to your iControlWP account, we’ll automatically setup a brand new monitor.
- Each monitor has the following characteristics:
- Your site is checked every 2 minutes
- 4 minute alert trigger / confirmation period.
- HTTP(S) – does your site’s homepage respond/load when we send out the request
- If we detect a website is down, you’ll get an immediate notification to either your email, or your phone, or both.
- Once it’s back online, you’ll receive a similar notification.
Note: You’ll only get 1 notice per down/up incident
You are also free to change your site checking frequency. You can check it every minute, if you like, and you can set the trigger confirmation period to shorter if you want to be alerted “faster”.
But, you must understand, if you set these values too low, you’ll likely get some false positives. Sometimes websites just don’t response with a request, but it doesn’t mean it’s “down”. We highly recommend keeping your trigger/confirmation value at least 3 minutes to reduce false positives.
How can you get the site Uptime Monitoring add-on?
The uptime monitoring add-on is account-wide – you don’t pay extra per site to use it. Activating it simple and you just add it to your account like any other add-on.
We currently have 4 different add-ons available in iControlWP
- White Labelling
- Update Notifications
- Client Reports
and now..
- Uptime Monitoring
We’ve included Uptime Monitoring with all Pro+ accounts but if it’s not included in your current plan you can easily add it to your account or upgrade your subscription.
Questions or Feedback?
We’re constantly trying to improve our services to best match your needs as managers of multiple websites.
We feel site uptime monitoring is key in this workflow, and there is many such features to come. If you have ideas, suggestions, or feedback on our existing products, please leave us a comment below.
Thank you!
