Today’s edition in our Services We Use Series will be short and sweet; however, the brevity of the post doesn’t diminish the importance of this service. StatusCake is our choice for a dedicated uptime monitor. We briefly mentioned uptime monitoring in our DropMySite post. Where DropMySite covers the basics, StatusCake has more advanced options for monitoring and notifications.

Uptime Monitoring Configuration

As mentioned in the introduction, StatusCake provides some great capabilities on setting up monitors.

• Check Rate – how often StatusCake will check a website (options for as fast as every 30 seconds to as slow as once every 24 hours)
• Multiple Locations – location from where the checks are sent (options for checking from over 28 countries)
• Alert Delay Rate – time StatusCake waits before sending an alert
• Confirm Alert – number of locations that must be confirmed as down before sending the alert

With all of these settings, we’re able to fine tune how often the checks occur and how fast we should be alerted. This helps us to minimize the alerts during quick downtime that doesn’t need our attention. We typically set everything up to get our first alert after 10 – 15 minutes of downtime.

Notifications

What’s a great uptime monitor without great notifications. On top of email, StatusCake offers many different ways to receive notifications. The two methods that we use are the Slack integration and text notifications. For all of our client projects, we setup notifications to go to Slack as a backup just in case we are having email issues. These Slack notifications come at the same interval and help us to actively resolve any issues that may arise. For a couple of projects, we do have text notifications turned on. Whenever one of these websites goes down, I personally receive a text message denoting the website is down.

Other Services

StatusCake offers these additional services as well:

• Page Speed Monitoring – Analyze the speed at which your website loads with StatusCake Page Speed Monitoring
• SSL Monitoring – Having an SSL certificate is no longer a nice to have. No certificate can impact SEO and cause trust issues with your customers.
• Domain Monitoring – Ensure that your domain is never lost through failing to renew it or by it being hijacked.
• Server Monitoring – Get alerted by StatusCake Server Monitoring when custom thresholds of RAM, CPU and Disk usage are exceeded.
• Virus Scanning – Ensure that your website hasn’t been infected with trojans, viruses, malware or other malicious threats that could cause harm to your website visitors.

Read more about these features at https://www.statuscake.com/features/.

The importance of actively monitoring websites can’t be overstated. It’s inevitable that an issue or two may arise. Our goal is to resolve issues before website visitors see the issues. StatusCake allows us to easily accomplish that goal through its advanced configuration and multiple notification options. If you have any questions about how StatusCake can help your business, feel free to leave a comment or contact us

Status Cake | Services We Use Series