Once you’ve created your blog and spent time building your audience, you will want to make sure to protect all your hard work.
One of the nice things about being a blogger is that you can take some days off here and there and still have your blog up and running. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye on your blog while you take some time off.
I have talked about a few of these things before like keeping your themes and plugins up to date as well as monitoring the number of visitors to your blog.
But the most important thing to keep an eye on is whether your blog is up and running! This is known as “uptime” and it’s something that every serious blogger needs to keep an eye on.
Why would your blog have “downtime”? Most of the time this is an issue with your hosting company. If you choose a good hosting company like I recommend in my guide, this should keep any issues to a bare minimum. But even good hosting companies have a few minutes of downtime every year for maintenance.
So how do you keep an eye on your blog’s uptime?
The most straightforward way to make sure your blog is up and running is to simply visit your blog and make sure it loads correctly. But almost no one will remember to do this right every day, and ideally you want to make know as soon as your blog is down so that you can contact your hosting company to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible.
This can be easily accomplished with an uptime monitoring service which notifies you as soon as your blog is down. There are several services like this, but my favorite is Host-Tracker.com. You get a text or email as soon as your blog experiences any downtime, and they also monitor your domain name registration to make sure you don’t accidentally let it lapse.
While I don’t recommend uptime monitoring to new bloggers, if you have an established blog that you depend on for income then I think it is no brainer to get a service like Host-Tracker to make sure everything is running smoothly.