Wait, our site is down?

Are you monitoring your websites to be sure they're up and running properly?

If you happen to notice that one of your sites is not responding, are you sure it's offline for real, or is it just unreachable from your local internet connection?

Here are two tools you can use — for free — to make sure your sites are up and running:

• Uptime Robot will send you an alert — by email or on your mobile device — if your site goes offline. At Joinery, we use this service to monitor all the sites we host for our clients, so we can react quickly if there's a problem.

• FreshPing lets you type in any web address to check whether it’s really offline for everyone. If it says your site is up and running, but you can’t access the site yourself, then it’s not everybody — it’s just you. Try reconnecting your wifi or rebooting your router. (FreshPing also appears to offer some kind of paid monitoring service, but the pricing is complex; and anyway, I recommend you go with uptime robot for that.)

You can read more about these and other tools on Joinery’s Resources and tools page.

All the best,
A.