Andy Milk Interactive

“What goes up, must come down”.  - Proverb

Wait, that’s a little boring.  How about:

“It’s a good thing we have gravity, or else when birds died they’d just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused.” - Stephen Wright

Another service that hosting providers offer is some sort of uptime monitoring.  I’ve found they vary from host to host and often times they only monitor if the web server and/or database is still up and running.  If you have some weird error that crops up in your application from, for instance, a long-running never-ending process, or unexpected user data input that breaks the site, or a malicious attack, your host’s uptime monitor likely won’t catch this problem.

I use a very cheap (free if you only track a few sites) uptime monitor from SiteUptime.com to track my clients’ sites.  If one of them goes down and returns ANY code other than HTTP 200 (OK), the monitor emails me.  Since I’m unhealthily attached to my iPhone, I’m checking email constantly and I’ll know within 5-10 minutes of the site going down that there’s a problem.  If it’s a mission critical application, you can elect to have text messages sent in the event of an outage.

This is an easy one to stay on top of the integrity of your sites and projects.