Monitoring your Blog

After creating your blog and investing time in building an audience, it’s essential to protect all your hard work.

One of the great benefits of being a blogger is the flexibility to take days off while your blog continues to run. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep tabs on your blog during those breaks.

I’ve previously mentioned some ways to do this, such as keeping your themes and plugins updated and monitoring visitor numbers on your blog.

But the most crucial thing to track is whether your blog is up and running—known as “uptime”—and it’s vital for every serious blogger to monitor.

Why might your blog experience “downtime”? Most often, this is an issue with your hosting company. Choosing a reliable hosting provider, like the one I recommend in my guide, will keep these issues to a minimum. However, even the best hosting companies may have a few minutes of downtime each year for maintenance.

So how do you keep an eye on your blog’s uptime?

The most straightforward way to make sure your blog is up and running is to simply visit your blog and make sure it loads correctly. But almost no one will remember to do this right every day, and ideally you want to make know as soon as your blog is down so that you can contact your hosting company to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible.

This can be easily accomplished with an uptime monitoring service which notifies you as soon as your blog is down. There are several services like this, but my favorite is Host-Tracker.com. You get a text or email as soon as your blog experiences any downtime, and they also monitor your domain name registration to make sure you don’t accidentally let it lapse.

While I don’t recommend uptime monitoring to new bloggers, if you have an established blog that you depend on for income then I think it is no brainer to get a service like Host-Tracker to make sure everything is running smoothly.