Do you know that server uptime is important?
A website that is down will lead to many issues, from losing revenue generation stream (if you are selling anything on your site) to losing readers.
As a blogger and affiliate marketer, no one wants to have an inaccessible website. However, do you know that you need to pay attention to your server uptime?
Must Read: The Ultimate Guide in Finding The Best Web Hosting for Small Business
What is server uptime?
Server uptime is considered the time the server is running. When the server is up, your website is accessible and all the good things happen.
Uptime is a computer industry term for the time during which a computer is operational. Downtime is the time when it isn’t operational. Source.
You get website visitors, chance of selling your products online and more importantly, opportunity to make more money online.
Now, let me ask you. Do you know what happens when your website is experiencing downtime?
More importantly, the feeling of having a website downtime is bad. You are angry, feeling miserable and it certainly felt like having the world crashing down on you (when your primary income generates directly from blogging).
Take a look at the image below.
See the traffic drop (red arrows) which happened to one of my niche site in the month of April 2018.
Few days back, I was trying to understand the reasons for my low earning from this specific site. After going through Google Analytics, I was shocked and angry.
My cheap VPS service failed me big time.
As you can see in the images, there are several downtime experienced which leads to the overall server uptime. In this case, my website was not loading properly and visitors are getting errors.
How to check website availability?
One of the best way to monitor website availability is through ManageWP.
What is ManageWP and What Does It Do?
ManageWP is a WordPress management console (or dashboard) which comes in very handy to those who need to manage more than one WordPress site at a time.
ManageWP is a free to use, website monitoring tool that allows you to monitor not only the server’s uptime but as well as the overall health of your website.
You can easily customize your dashboard setting and it works well with Google Analytics too (which is a huge plus).
While ManageWP is a free tool to check on your server uptime, there are additional options you can go for such as getting real time notification on your website and SEO monitoring which starts at $1 per service.
Change web host to experience better server uptime
You know I’m always a fan of web hosting and working with a web host that cannot guarantee my server uptime is really bad.
The biggest problem when it comes to server uptime and web hosting is that most web host services offer 99% uptime. But do you know that the 1% downtime equals to 87 hours or slightly over 3 days?
Time is money, and I rather pay more money than having my website constantly inaccessible.
Yes, I moved host. Previously, I’m paying around $12 per month for a VPS. I got to admit that it is way better than most shared web hosting services but the downtime is killing me.
Bonus Material: Finding for the best and cheap web hosting services that come with great performance? Read this post.
I went on migrating to the all-time-favorite, FlyWheel.
With FlyWheel, I get:
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The pricing structure for FlyWheel is really good and it is way better than most of managed WordPress hosting services in the market.
Here’s the pricing structure:
My niche site isn’t huge and it is slightly below 5,000 visits in a month. Thus, spending $14 ($2 more than my previous VPS) is a no brainer. More importantly, it is a massive win for me!
FlyWheel Alternative?
WPEngine is the next closest alternative to FlyWheel and WPEngine is often recommended as one of the best managed WordPress hosting for beginners and business owners.
The new pricing package for WPEngine starts at $30 per month and comes with Content Delivery Network (CDN) services to further speed up your site!
Bonus: Spot checking your website uptime
Do you know that you can also check your website uptime on the web?
Here are some sites you can use to check if your website is accessible or down:
Summary: Server Uptime and Website Availability
To recap, website owners need to play more attention on server uptime and monitor the website availability.
Having a website down is bad only for your income streams but also for your brand.
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