I’m feel little bit frustrated today when one of my websites is unavailable due to the server is down. The reason given is due to the file system is corrupted. But I can’t really understand why it should take quite sometime, and furthermore it happen twice, last night and this morning when the number of visitors normally higher. I work in IT background as well, and if this kind of situation happens, normally the production will be fail over to backup or disaster recovery server to restore the functionality as soon as possible. At the mean time the corrupted server can be fixed off line without affecting the productivity. Simple!!

With the cost of server cheaper nowadays, I’m can’t really understand why this thing can happen. I’m never operating any web hosting company but I know the server price pretty much from my subscription to several newsletters from several computer companies around.

All in 1?

As I plan to move all my websites into 1 web hosting company, I’m asking my self is this is correct move. If this situation happens in future, I will lose all my websites which means no revenue. The situation maybe different if I host my website with establish web hosting company oversees such as Hostgator, but since I just operate less than 1 year, the fee maybe a little bit higher.

Having only 1 web hosting company is better in terms of managing them, but as I have mentioned above, the situation could be worst if wrong web hosting company were chosen. I do want to know what you think. Or if you have encountered the same situation in the past, let share it here. At the mean time, I’m also looking affordable but trustable web hosting company around. Hope I choose the correct one this time. Chill out!!

Your website uptime and availability is the most important part for webmaster. However there are times when your server is up but the website is down due to works of unethical, unprofessional group of people so called of ‘cracker’ aka bad hacker.

I have experienced this on my website but not very serious where my hosting company has taken necessary steps to overcame this problem earlier

I’m not very good in scripting to detect anything wrong if in my website, but using this free tool available online will help you in monitoring your website on daily basis.

Using StatCounter to view the trend and behavior of your visitors

I wrote about stat counter few weeks back, and I’m pretty happy having it installed on my websites. It works like charm and I have greet the owner of this incredible tool. The features that I love most about StatCounter is their ‘drill down’ function which enable you viewing your visitors detail such as IP address on each type of statistic provided.

The most statistics that I love is ‘popular pages’. From here, you can view popular pages, reference source, pages viewed and how long they have accessing our website.

To determine if they’re genuine visitors, what I monitor normally if the came from search engines or direct, visiting time is not too long (eg: more than 1-2 hour), the pages viewed is vary (not in certain pattern such as they keep viewing on certain dynamically generated URL continually).

If you’re suspect something wrong with this visitor, use drill down function to get the IP address and mark it with any name.

Monitor the same IP from time to time if they behave the same way again. You also might want to block this IP address using Cpanel or you might ask your web host company to block the IP address

Using IP lookup tool

IP lookup tool is very useful to trace where the visitors came from. There are several website online provide this service, but most of them time I’m using http://www.arin.net/whois/. IP address is like computer identification number, it is unique. However this IP address can be changed and it was inaccurate if it sits behind proxy.

By looking into the IP address, you will have any idea at least from where it came from. If you’re using static IP address, you have a chance to be found more easily.

There are more powerful tool called ip2location from ip2location.com which can drill down the IP address and give you complete information who is your visitor by using combination of IP address and zip code. However, this service is available in US only.

Google Webmaster web crawl function

If you’re using Google webmaster, browse over to ‘Diagnostic’ tab followed by ‘Web Crawl’ at the left pane. From this page, you will see few types of error which might include someone who had tried embedding link on your website. If your website has thousands of pages where the URL is dynamically generated by your script, you will be able to view all errors by downloading the error as XLS file. Analyze downloaded file to view URL which was filtered by robots.txt or in 404 error, or any URL that is looks strange to you.

Using this free tools is worth in drilling down your visitors and content. If you have other free tool that is useful, please leave your thought