You Wouldn’t Wish This Could Happen to You
This morning we woke up to find that one of our servers (the one this site resides on) was down and had been for about 4 hours. By the time we realised it and contacted our host they were already working on repairing the fault.
Until recently we hadn’t much on that server that was critical so the monitoring system we had in place only sent out an email whenever the server went off line. But a few months ago Toni added a new site and a new service for some of our clients to that server and even though we should have upgraded the monitoring system we hadn’t done so.
So as soon as the server was back on line we went looking for a new monitoring service that could do more than email us if there was a problem. Of course we went to Google and on the first page we looked at we found a paid ad for just what we were looking for.
We hit the link … several times … and each time the company that had placed that ad paid Google to show us a blank page. Yep, all we got each time we tried that link was a pristine white page devoid of anything.
I do most of my browsing in Firefox and there are times when sites just don’t come up in Firefox. It’s usually a coding problem that causes the page to fail completely in Firefox even though it may be showing up quite clearly in Internet Explorer.
If you’re running a small business website let me tell that a problem like that can be fixed even before the site or page goes live simply by spending a few moments checking it in each browser. A few extra minutes in the checking stage can save you time and money further down the track.
There must be nothing more frustrating than paying Google for the privilege of showing someone a blank page - and you wouldn’t want that to happen to you, would you?
