Monitor Site – Uptime

Video Transcript

In this class, we’re going to cover how to monitor your site’s uptime, without cost or hassle.

And while your site’s uptime may not be much of a security hardening feature, it can be a way to alert you when something bad enough happens that takes your site offline. Now, your site being offline or down, is not always a security breach. Actually, it rarely is. But it is important to know when your site goes down, so that you can more quickly address whatever the problem is or was. Now there’s another reason to monitor your site’s uptime. The item within the monitoring service that checks your site on a regular basis will come in very handy when setting up other security measures, which we’re going to be touching on in the next class, undoing backups using a plugin.

Now there are several services on the market both free and paid for that you can use to monitor your site. The one I’m going to be showing you in this class is called uptime robot. That’s what I have on the screen right now. Now they’ve got a fantastic premium service. And you can get the prices right here. But I’m only going to cover the free version, which I’ve been using for several years. And I’m very happy with. So let’s begin by registering for the free account. Just click on register for free. Now the registration process pretty straightforward. Put in your name, email address, create a password. And if you want information about new features or updates, be sure to check this box and then click on Register now.

Then like it says, head on over to your email address, and click the activation link. And here we are on click on that pretty self explanatory, activate the account by clicking here. And it brings us back to the site. So I guess I can close this up now. And this is our dashboard. And with this one account, you can add as many different sites as you want. Just click on add new monitor, enter the information, the URL and the monitoring interval for the free service, the shortest amount of time is every five minutes, you can move this up to however much you want. So somewhere between five to 20 minutes, totally up to you. And you can always come back in here and adjust this later.

All my other sites are set to 20 minutes. So that’s where I’m going to put this one. And if you want to take a look at the advanced settings, check that out here. Some of these advanced settings are premium items only. I’ve never used them. So they’re there just in case you want to check them out. Now, of course you want to be notified if the site goes down. So select one of the alert contacts you have down here. Just starting off, you’re just going to have the one but you have the ability to add more if you want to. And then click on Create monitor. And that’s it. Go and click outside of this box you can see over here is your monitoring service. And to demonstrate what the monitoring service looks like after it’s pinged your site, which is what happens during those intervals that we had set earlier between the five minutes and however long you have it set up for mine was for 20 minutes while I waited for more than 20 minutes, so that I can come back and show you what the reports look like.

As you can see right now, as of the last pane, the monitored site has been up 100% of the time, yay. And over here on the right, we’ve got the account dashboard. But I wanted to show you also that if you wanted to go in and adjust your settings like maybe adding another contact email, I just little gear icon here to the right click on that you can reset the stats, you can delete the account, or you can edit it. Here’s read committed and adjust the monitoring interval, which again is how often uptime robot pings your site. And if we come over here to the right on the account dashboard, this shows the number of monitors. As it says here for the free account.

We’ve got 50 that we can use. And we just click on our monitor name. This gives us a little bit more of a detailed look over here on the right as to what’s going on. And the TV mode basically just takes this right panel and brings it full width. And you can close this out by clicking on exit TV mode up here in the top right. And that’s it that’s going to bring us to the end of this class on how to set up uptime robot to monitor your site’s uptime. Thanks for checking it out and you have a great day.