Want to see how well your web server is performing? It's a good idea to have some sort of 3rd party monitoring program that regularly pings your web server and logs the response time and timeout events. If your server is not being nice (or not meeting their claimed uptime), you can use this data as leverage for negotiating or just to inform them that you're seeing more downtime than you'd like.

Here is a simple guide on setting up a status and response time check for your website.

Step 1

Set up a blank or very basic HTML file somewhere on your site/server. This will be the file that the monitoring program will ping to determine your server's response time and status. It is important to use an un-used file, so that the pings don't mess with your analytics.

Step 2

Sign up at Pingdom or another free 3rd party server monitoring site. Pingdom allows you to create a status check for one server for free, which is probably all you'll need. Set up the check for the URL to the un-used file you created in step one.

Depending on the monitoring program, you may have a choice of resolution for the check. For example, you can have the program check your server every minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, etc. How detailed of a report you want will affect your choice. 5 minutes is probably sufficient if you're just curious about overall downtime or response time and do not need to act on individual downtime events.

Step 3

You're done. Give it some time for results to accrue.