Internet offers many business opportunities and owning a website is a fantastic way of earning money while you sit at home. Being a website owner, you constantly need to be updated about the condition and traffic in your website for efficient analysis and troubleshooting, if any problem occurs. Website monitoring services do that job of tracking your website’s uptime and downtime, the traffic it is holding and also alerting you through SMS or mails when your site goes down. Another interesting way you can monitor your website is by creating your own site tracker through Google docs. Google docs helps you to configure it in such a way that it starts giving instant updates about your site’s health.
Let’s first talk about how you can configure Google docs to monitor your website. There are a few simple steps that will take a minute only:-
(i) If you are signed in your Google account then you may click here and make a copy of the Google Docs sheet.
(ii) Enter your site’s URL in the cell E3 and your e-mail address in the cell E5. This mail address is the address where you will be receiving updates and notifications regarding the uptime and downtime of your site.
(iii) Next, you need click on tools. Click on script editor in the sub menu and then on resources and then on current script’s triggers. Here, you can set a time driven trigger of any choice to get notifications. A five minute trigger means that, your website will be checked every five minutes.
(iv) You can then save the trigger and authorize the trigger when Google docs displays a red warning asking for authorization.
Having done that, you will now receive mails from google docs whenever your website is down. Google docs understands the problem when it has trouble accessing your website. Once the issue is resolved, you will get a good health message.
All the details regarding the website’s downtime are suitably logged in the tables of the Google docs sheet itself. You can go through the data anytime and analyse the overall performance of the website.
For the more informed ones, you may make your own website tracking app in twitter which can update you about the health of your website through personal tweets and apps.