Plugin Review: Jetpack Availabiliy Monitoring

One of the most useful suite of WordPress websites tools comes bundled under the plugin Jetpack.  In this post I want to talk about one feature of the many available and that is availability monitoring.

You can download Jetpack from this URL http://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/.

What Is Availability Monitoring

Availability monitoring is the process of checking your site is up and reporting if it goes down.

There are many tools out there such as Uptimerobot that do this, some premium some free,  but Jetpack is a very lightweight and simple way to monitor the availability of your site for free.

Why It’s so Important

The majority of site owners I know do not spend 100% of their time on their site.  Unless they have an availability monitor they don’t know when their site is down.

More importantly the message sent out to potential clients or customers about their products and services is impacted if your site is down when they visit, you only get one chance to impress and a down site will ruin that chance.

Examples:

I’ve had my site down when running pay per click campaigns, every click through to my down site was costing me money, and there was no way to recoup that money via leads.

I’ve had a client running their site on a poor quality hosting supplier, the availability monitor proved how poor their service way.

How Jetpack Monitoring Works

The good people at WordPress.com will ping your site on a recurring basis testing to see if it is up and running, if it detects error messages or the correct responses are not sent, an email is activated saying your site is down.

The point of this is that it’s an external site that is checking your site just like a user would.  It’s not something internal on your site that will fail when the rest of the site is down.

Your site will be pinged again and alerts will be sent every few minutes saying you are still down until your site comes back up.  Then you get an all clear message.

See this page for full details http://jetpack.me/support/monitor/

How To Setup Jetpack

Install and config the plugin from the URL at the top fo this page.

Create an account and WordPress.com and sync jetpack with that account.

Go to Jetpack -> settings, scroll down to monitor and activate it.  Set your email address and it’s as simple as that.  Here is a quick video to show you how.

[youtube http://youtu.be/5KgoQWMBiOc]

Wrap up

Jetpack has a host of really useful tools like an improved spell checker which used to be known as After The Deadline , Infinite Scroll and Carousel to name just three, Jetpack is something I recommend for all site owners.

Photo Credit: sebilden via Compfight cc