Why Monitoring Your Own Website Is Important

I apologize to anyone who has tried to load this website over the last few days.  

It is excruciatingly, painfully slow.  I noticed it Friday morning when checking my websites analytics and noticed a jump in bounce rates.  I immediately ran a test at http://www.webpagetest.org/ to identify the slowness.

Turns out my website host (not to name names, but the name incorporates “dream & host” into it’s URL), is taking over 30 seconds to send the first bytes of data…. 30 seconds!  If I hadn’t checked my analytics and noticed the jump in bounce rates, or checked my site it may have been days before I noticed something was amiss.

I contacted my current hosting provider and they assure me they were looking into it.

Their response was as follows:

The web server is having accounts being offloaded and will be high a few more days.
We’re actively working on reducing load and are offloading high usage accounts to relieve stress on the server.
Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

I have problems with this as the answer for several reasons:

1. They have my account info… yet they didn’t contact me (or I assume any other site owners) to let them know there was a problem with their server.  
2. This problem is going to take several days to fix
3. My website is pretty much useless until they fix it… which means that all of my Ad Words, online marketing, etc that are currently running are for nothing, because no one can view they site for at least 30 seconds while it loads.
4. If my website isn’t up, then my business is essentially closed.  It’s hard to make money when the front doors to the store are jammed shut, and potential customers can’t get in.

What ever happened to good customer service?  

Would of it taken my host all of a few minutes to email the account owners on that server to inform them there was a problem?  Why all the “hush hush” about the server having problems.  Problems happen, I get that and so do most people.  But to hide the fact that there is a problem only makes me wonder what else they have not told me about in the past.  Have there been other issues that I was not aware of?  

Enough is enough I said.  If you are reading this you will notice that the site is back online… and running faster than before.  

I took matters in my own hands and migrated my site to a new host at HostGator.com.  

I don’t have days to wait for my old host to fix their issue. I have a business to run… and I suspect so do lots of other business owners who had sites hosted on the same server.  

If my old host had been more forthcoming with the problems, I may have stuck it out. I understand that problems happen.  But the fact that they were aware of the problem, and were not forthcoming is not how I do business with anyone and not how I want them to do business with me.