Don’t you wish you would know when your website is down? Owning a website is not enough, maintaining it is important as well. The first aspect of maintenance would know how often your website is down or, rather how often the server of your website does not allow visitors. For this purpose, there are many analysis software and, other related maintenance software that intimate you when your website is down. But, they are expensive. You have a rather inexpensive option of knowing when your website goes down and, that is via the Google Docs. You can get intimation regarding your website downtime and up time with this Google Docs. Here is how to monitor your website’s uptime with Google Docs.
1. Creating the Monitoring Doc:
You should have a copy of the Google Docs spreadsheet with you. Once that is in hand, change the website URL mentioned to your website address. Also change the Email address for notification to your Email Id. Once this is done, your next step would be to go to notifying section. Go to script editor that runs under tools and select resources. In resources select current script triggers and select “ismysitedown” in the drop down menu. After that select the Time driven and minutes driven and choose the time you wish to be notified about the downtime. You can have an alarm set every five minutes or so too. This is not the end. You would need to authorize your Google Docs and, finally run play the script. Once this is done, your Google doc is authorized to give you information about downtime. You obviously need to press start in the website monitoring bar to start the monitoring process. Remember, your uptime and downtime will be automatically logged to your system and, notifications will be sent to you either via Email or SMS.
2. The Working:
There is a script trigger that helps send that information via Email or SMS. The Google script that is associated with the monitoring process gets triggered as per the time set by you. Once the trigger occurs, the doc fetches information regarding uptime or downtime from your website, the URL of which is mentioned. If the http code is not 200 then your website might be facing a problem that needs to be sorted out. Mostly, your server would be down and, you need to check on it at the earliest.
3. SMS Alerts:
Get your mobile number registered of your Google accounts. This would be beneficial to get SMS alerts. In case of Email, the response is not sent immediately. But, in case of SMS the alerts are sent in 30 seconds of the trigger message.
Maintenance of your website is very tough. So, ensure you keep these alerts on for better maintenance.
