Picking the right web host for your needs is one of the most important parts in becoming a webmaster. It’s a fact, slow loading web pages equals less visitors to your websites. Studies have shown that a website that takes longer than two seconds to load loses visitors exponentially. However, there are a few tools you can use to keep your web host in check and make sure they are providing you an optimal service. Using things ranging from DNS health checks to speed tests, you should be able to use these tools to find a web host that works for you. Zerolag web hosting company is one of the few that meet all my requirements.
Uptime Monitoring
Let’s face it, when dealing with technology downtime is inevitable. Most legitimate web hosts will guarantee you a certain amount of uptime. Uptime is rated using the 9s scale, and you will get a guarantee anywhere from 99.9% to 99.999%. We all know you can’t be on your website 24/7, so how can you really tell if they are holding up their end of the bargain? That’s where Pingdom’s uptime monitoring tool comes in to play. They will periodically send a request to your server to make sure it’s up. If it’s down, it will log the information or errors it receives and notify you via email or SMS. Services like these will allow you to both be informed about downtime, and respond to it if necessary.
Page Load Time
Page load time is an extremely important aspect of your website, especially for Google rankings. Google admits to using page load time as one of their metrics for ranking websites in the search results. There are quite a few ways you can lower the load time of your web page, however, how can you monitor your results? Pingdom has a tool that will give you detailed information about page loads. You can see how many requests were made, and how long each specific request took. From this data you can identify problem scripts or images, and track your results over time.
DNS Health
DNS is how computers translate a domain name to an IP address. Without DNS, we would be stuck entering in an IP address every time we wanted to connect to a website. Usually our web hosts are responsible for managing the DNS servers we use for our domain names, so it’s important to keep them in check. Using Pingdom’s DNS health checker you can get detailed tests ran on the servers you’re using. They provide health reports and even offer you advice to correct any issues they find.
