Over the last seven years I have had close to a dozen different web hosts for various different reasons. In that time I’ve learned that there are two very important things that I need from a hosting company in order for them to keep me as a customer.

  • Uptime
  • Customer service

In the last few years, I’ve only gone with hosts that have great customer service via email, instant messaging clients and live chat functions on their websites. Uptime can be a bit tricky though, since I don’t always check my sites daily. This is where Host-Tracker.com comes in. Their site does not have the user-friendliest interface when you first go there, to be honest it is very busy and I was somewhat reluctant to even try to use their services, but signed up for a free account anyway.

The purpose of the site is to send ping requests to your web server to ensure it is online. You can set the intervals at which this happens, I chose once an hour, as I don’t have a need to ping it to death, my hosts have been pretty reliable. The site also provides data and charts as time goes on to show what the uptime really is, which can be important if a host is claiming 99.9% uptime, as many do.

I’ve been using the service for a few days and so far am pretty happy with the results. You can easily add several sites to be checked under one account and set each one do its own check-in times, handy for me since I run several sites. They also offer the ability to add a chicklet style button to your site to show your uptime. To me, this is a positive and negative thing. I added one to the footer of this site, ironically the image link is currently dead, hopefully it will start resolving soon or I’m going to yank it. On the flip side, if you get into a host that is going down every few days and your uptime chicklet says something like 96% online, it doesn’t look good to your customers, so I don’t think I’d leave it on. I’m still undecided if the button will stay on forever, I’d like to at least give it a chance to live, especially since it is currently at 100%.

Lastly, be aware that using a service like this will affect your web stats, especially if you choose to have your site monitored every 5 minutes. Since a ping will be made, your traffic could look like it is going way up, in reality they are not people looking at your site, just the bots doing their job.

Host-Tracker.com

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