Site Monitoring With Content Check - Why You Need It
Do you own a website? How do you know if it is up and running? Most web hosting companies do not monitor websites that are hosted on their servers and it is the website owners' responsibility to inform the web hosting companies when their websites are down.
So how do you ensure that your site is alive? You do not want to wait till your angry customers start complaining. You would have lost a lot of potential sales by then. Your site might be removed from Google's indexed results if it is down for an extended period of time. If you are using PPC (Pay Per Click) services like Google Adwords, you will continue to incur advertisement expenses even when your site is down. It will also frustrate potential customers who are directed to your site to find out that it is not available. Your site will lose its credibility and future traffic to your site will be adversely affected.
To get alerts when your website is down, you need to subscribe to a site monitoring service. The site monitoring service should let you specify the URL that you want to monitor, the frequency of monitoring, and how you would like to be alerted when your site is down. Once the monitoring task is set up, the site monitoring service will ping the URL at the interval (in minutes, hours, or days) that you specify. If the ping is unsuccessful, you will get an instant alert (via email, SMS, phone calls, etc).
While most site monitoring services offer features mentioned above, a very important feature that you should look for is content checking. A site monitoring service that offers content checking allows you to specify a string or phrase that you expect to see on your website. If the string or phrase is not found during the ping, you will get an alert.
Why do you need content checking in your site monitoring service? One major reason is to detect hacking of your website. If a hacker hacks into your website and replaces it with his/her own content, technically the site is still alive and your site monitoring service will not be able to detect that your website is hacked if it does not check for a particular string or phrase in the content of your page.
Content checking in your site monitoring service is also very important if you are an affiliate marketer who wants to ensure that your vendor's site is up and running all the time. For example, if you are a ClickBank affiliate and you spend thousands of dollars promoting a hop link, how do you know if the vendor is still selling the product that you are promoting? If ClickBank bans a certain product or vendor after you obtain the hop link, you will never get a notification. When you visit the hop link, ClickBank will display a message saying that the product is no longer available. Technically the hop link leads to a page that is alive. Your site monitoring service will not alert you if it does not check for certain string or phrase on the page.
To get first hand experience on how content checking work, please sign up for a free trial account at Content Site Monitoring. You will be able to sleep well at night knowing that you will get a notification when your website or your vendor's website is down or hacked into.
InetWiz is a software reviewer and technical writer for Ivertech Software Central. He enjoys sharing innovative software and websites with public users.
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