Many webmasters, especially those ones who do not work in-house, monitor several websites simultaneously. As a rule, these are websites of different orientation, with varying degrees of complexity. Because of this, very often the set of various tools needed for website monitoring expands so much that it becomes difficult to cope with it. And a simple daily routine begins to require a lot of effort and time.
End-user side website accessibility monitoring methods
The easiest and most effective way to check the performance of any website is through so-called “end user tests”. They also allow you to check website availability and web pages loading speed. In fact, those tests are emulations of basic user actions and connections over standard Internet protocols. Such tests include:
- HTTP requests. Tests answering speed to ordinary requests received from the user’s browser.
- Ping (TCP/IP) requests. Tests website or web server connection quality.
- TCP port availability. Diagnostics of the ability to connect to a particular application and particular port availability .
- Database check. Checks working database integrity, its connection quality, as well as its various indicators.
You should also check website response times and web page load speeds. This helps identify a number of non-obvious problems like ads or search engines’ troubles and more.
As a very important addition, you can monitor if a website gets on the IP blacklists (DNSBL). It is useful to check this because if the server IP is on such a blacklist, you will not be able to send e-mail messages to users. They will automatically be sent to spam. Monitoring these lists allows you to react to the problem in time and to send an unblocking request as soon as possible.
Ways to make monitoring multiple websites easier
Given all of the above, it is very difficult to handle even a basic set of website monitoring tools on your own. Of course, large companies can afford powerful automatic monitoring systems to do it. But usually such systems are configured to work with only one website. Therefore, a webmaster working with multiple websites is forced to look for ways to make the task easier for himself. And this is not as easy as it seems at first glance.
The easiest way to make simultaneous monitoring of multiple websites easier is to use automated tools. For example, you can turn to HostTracker, a service designed to provide effective website monitoring. This service is a multifunctional webmaster toolkit. And this toolkit performs each check and each test automatically according to a designated schedule.
Compared to other website monitoring services, it has the most variable set of tools to deal with various monitoring tasks. It uses more than 100 access points all around the world to provide the most complex monitoring sequences. And along with the aforementioned DNSBL checks, it also checks ISP-based blocklists. And it can easily handle multiple websites regardless of their complexity. On top of that, HostTracker notifies a webmaster if there’s something wrong with a website and gathers statistics after all tests and stores it.
