Your website has been down for a week. Everyone clicking on your link on Google goes to an error message. Potential clients that bookmarked your site last month knowing they’d come back this month are getting an error. Other lawyers trying to pull up your site to get your mailing address get zip – nothing.
You have no idea the site’s down. No one is telling you. You’re just sitting there wondering why the phone stopped ringing.
How did it happen?
Maybe you made some changes to the site and killed it (I did that to this site yesterday). Maybe you failed to pay your hosting bill and the host took it down. Maybe you failed to renew your domain name registration causing the site to disappear. Maybe your host had a power failure and after power returned, your site didn’t. Maybe someone hacked your site. The possibilities for failure are endless.
When, and it truly is “when” not “if”, this happens you need to know about it fast.
What can you do?
There are a number of services that will provide you with notice that your site is down. Each of these services has a variety of features. Some check your site every few minutes, others check every hour. Some will send you an email when the site goes down, others will text you. Some will notify you not only when the site is down, but also when the site slows down.
And they’ll do all that for free (at least for a while).
A couple of the services I’ve used are Pingdom (has a 30 day free trial) and Are My Sites Up? (has a free account). They’ve both worked well for me.
I’d suggest you spend a minute and set up an account. Alerts will be forthcoming.
You’ll get some false alarms where the site will be back up by the time you check on it. Little things like power outages sometimes cause the site to go down for a few minutes and return without a problem (we had that recently with our host – Rackspace).
The false alarms are well worth dealing with so that you’ll know when a serious problem crops up. Sign up today and you’ll know that all is well on your website.
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Lee Rosen has practiced family law for more than twenty years. With three offices, 
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Divorce Discourse: Is Your Website Down? http://goo.gl/fb/RZNV
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That’s a really useful article — in addition to our main website, which drives plenty of business, I am setting up a series of targeted microsites — 3 so far with another 20 or so planned over the next 12 months. Frankly it hadn’t occurred to me that there was such a service to keep an eye on whether my websites were up on not-or that I needed it. I will get my marketing manager to look into it straightaway. Many thanks
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Glad I could help. Great to hear from the UK.
Lee