As you may have seen on Twitter we moved our blog (blog.xaviermedia.com) to another server yesterday due to poor response times at the old server. So how did we know that the response times where poor? I’m using a service called mon.itor.us where you can setup web site checks to monitor up time and response times of web sites from three different locations in the world: US, Austria and Germany.

I like mon.itor.us because it’s free, easy to use, got nice graphs and you also get a weekly report with average load times and how much down time your site(s) had. When I for example wrote about the down time Entrecard.com had I used graphs from mon.itor.us to show the actual down time Entrecard.com had.

As you can see on the graph entrecard.com had horrible loading times for several hours on the 3rd of February. The uptime was as low as 75% which means that during 6 hours (25% of 24 hours) the visitors of entrecard.com couldn’t access the site or the time it took for the site to load was extremely long.

Here you’ll see the graph for adventure (the server hosting this blog) and entrecard.com from yesterday. Notice that the maximum response time for adventure is only 463 ms while entrecard.com got a maximum load time of horrible 8982 ms! If you study the graphs you’ll notice that Entrecard must have done something with it’s server around 4 since the load time improved dramatically.

Another example is winningtheweb.com with an average load time of 649ms which is bad. It’s especially bad for a blog about making money online since that’s a highly competitive niche. If the site is not loading fast the readers can get almost the same content from a much faster blog

Why do you need to monitor your web site?

Simply because if your site constantly goes down or is loading slow you will not be able to make any money and I guess most of you want to get some kind of income from your web projects. You will also be able to figure out if you need a new server because you’ve out grown your current hosting solution. Even if you don’t have your own server (you’re on shared hosting for example) you need to monitor your server status since some hosting companies fill their servers with thousands and thousands of sites. If all those sites grow, the server will pretty soon start acting slow which leads to less sales for you.

By using a service like mon.itor.us you’ll also get an idea how slow or fast your site loads from other locations then your own. In my case I can check the load time from US, Austria and Germany in the same graph

In these Internet days we need to update the phrase “time is money” to “server response time is money”

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 5:41 pm and is filed under EntreCard, Security, Web hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.