New Orleans Internet Marketing

A few years back I decided to start using website monitoring services, and I’m grateful that I did. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about hosting and how good or bad the services I was paying for were. This was part of the progression that led me to get a dedicated server last year, which was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a web designer / developer. Website monitoring is also vital if you’re running a search engine marketing campaign.

What do website monitoring services do?
They check your website from different locations around the world during the course of the day to make sure that it is up and functioning. You can usually choose how often you want them to check, and different services have different options. These days I use a company called Alertbot, and I’ve been pretty happy with them so far, but there are plenty of others out there and it’s good to shop around to get the features you want.

Why is monitoring a big deal? Don’t you know when your website is down?

1. The problem is, I didn’t always know… you just can’t be on your website around the clock. Especially when you have multiple sites.
2. For search engine marketing campaigns, being unaware of downtime can cost a lot of money and skew conversion data.
3. Downtime is money. When you have profitable websites, you lose money while they are down, regardless of whether or not you’re running pay-per-click campaigns.
4. I had no idea how unreliable shared hosting was. Once I started monitoring my sites on the shared accounts, I realized that I was having regular weekly downtime of anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour.
5. Monitoring services give you information that can be used to diagnose problems through support. When I talk to support about downtime, I now have a record of exactly when it occurred, with the IP of the test site(s), and the length of time it occurred. This information can go a long way in helping to get to the cause of the problem, and it gives credibility to your complaint – especially with shared hosting providers.

I’m glad I started doing this because it’s standard practice for me now. At our firm we always recommend that clients monitor their sites, and set it up ourselves if necessary. If you’re running a search marketing campaign for someone else, how do you know if you had a bad day conversion-wise, or if their site was down for a few critical hours and no one knew about it? Things like that could mean the difference between keeping and losing a good client.

In the Fall of last year, Francis Ford Coppola’s computer and backup hard drive were stolen, and he lost 15 years worth of data, including writing and family photographs. He offered a reward for its return, but he never did get it back.

On a much smaller scale, last month I had a backup hard drive fail, which under normal circumstances should be no big deal. I should be able to buy a new one and just replace it, but the problem was that I had stored some data on it which was not stored anywhere else – so it’s now gone for good. I have the option of spending a few hundred dollars on data recovery to see if it can be recovered, but I haven’t been able to decide if the data is worth the price.

What About Your Websites?
Just 2 weeks ago, there was a terrible fire at The Planet, one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. The fire interrupted thousands of servers, but supposedly no servers or networking equipment was damaged. Let’s suppose there had been damage. Suppose that your web server and its backups at your hosting provider were destroyed. Most people who work on static websites have copies on their local machine that they FTP. But how many websites these days are database driven? Are you backing up your databases? I don’t know many people who do, unfortunately.

Here’s What I Do.

I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve lost too many irreplaceable files over the years. I now have a library of digital pictures of my growing family from the past 5 years on my computer. Losing these files would be a great loss for me. So here’s how I’ve come to handle local data. Read the rest of this entry »

I have about 15-20 websites that I manage, and most of them are database driven these days. Managing databases adds another whole level of complexity to moving and backing up websites that didn’t exist when everything I managed was plain html years ago. Only having to deal with MYSQL databases these past few years, admittedly, I’m not a pro. But I’ve managed to get the hang of things, for the most part.

So the old process was really cumbersome. At times, I had to install PHPmyadmin if it wasn’t already on the server, then worry about conflicting versions or settings between PHPmyadmin on different servers. Frequently, I got errors when importing SQL files that were dumped from another server. It really became a nightmare when I was trying to move sites from Media Temple to Liquid Web recently.

Then I found Navicat (http://www.navicat.com). Navicat is a program for Windows, MAC, or Linux, that allows you to manage MYSQL databases with a nice GUI and easy to use, straightforward features.

Have you ever purchased software, when you really didn’t want to spend the extra money, and then afterwards you thought to yourself, “wow, that was the best investment I’ve made in a long time?”

That’s how I felt after purchasing Navicat. It stores al of my DB settings, and I can backup, transfer, sync, edit, import & export, all with just a few clicks. It’s literally cut my DB management time by about 75%. Talk about “making an amateur feel like a pro.” Another good thing was that they had a fully functional 30 day trial available for download. So I got to use it for a while before I actually made the purchase.

I just wanted to pass this on because Navicat is “good stuff.” It seems rare these days that I run into products that work out of the box, and help me to accomplish my goals easier.