7 Reasons Your Website Needs WhoAPI

This article is sponsored by WhoAPI. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Completing a professional, functional, attractive, award-winning website is not the end of your problems — it's the start. You must also...

• find a suitable and reliable host
• register a domain and configure DNS entries
• purchase and install Secure Socket Certificates
• configure your server and deploy your site or application
• create and populate databases
• define email addresses and management options.

If everything goes perfectly, your site is live on the web and serving visitors from all over the world. Will it stay that way? Consider what would happen if:

• your site becomes very popular very quickly
• you have a problem with your software stack
• your application exceeds allocated disk space
• your host fails or goes out of business
• there are problems with your domain or certificates
• your site is targeted by unscrupulous entities!

You should be aware of problems before your users, but that's unlikely unless you're using your site or app all day, every day. Fortunately, services such as WhoAPI provide robust monitoring facilities which alert you before serious problems occur.

Here are seven ways a monitoring service can help your site and sanity...

1. Ensure Your Domain Name Never Expires

It's easy to snatch an expired domain. There are several services which do the hard work for you: you enter a domain owned by someone else and a bot will purchase it on your behalf the moment it becomes available.

Domain registrars normally alert you before expiry but there's no guarantee you'll receive it. Perhaps you initially signed up with an old email address or the message was marked as spam. Staff in larger organizations may presume domain renewal is someone else's responsibility and ignore the warnings.

Domain expiries can happen to the biggest and best of us. There are plenty of scare stories such as the time Microsoft forgot to renew hotmail.co.uk.

A good monitoring service will nag you to renew your domain before it expires. The WhoAPI whitepaper provides more information for domain owners.

2. Ensure Your SSL Never Expires

Like domains, SSL certificates are normally renewed every year. Unfortunately, you will not always be warned about expiry and users will be faced with a scary security warning even if there's nothing inherently wrong or insecure about your site or the technologies it uses.

A good monitoring service will alert you before SSL expiry becomes an emergency.

3. Be Notified of Website Failures

Failures can occur for numerous reasons and any fault can lead to unexpected downtime or usage difficulties. If you're running a WordPress-powered website you've inevitably encountered the dreaded "Error Establishing a Database Connection" page.

You can build fault tolerance into all your systems but it's difficult to cater for all eventualities and it can only go so far. There's little you can do to prevent business or hardware-related issues.

Make sure you are the first person to be notified when — not if — a failure occurs.

4. Automatically Backup Your Website Files

I hope I don't need to remind you about the importance of backups? Unfortunately, the majority of computer users never consider backups until it's too late and that could include your client or boss. Backups can still go wrong even with a robust archiving strategy...

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by Craig Buckler via SitePoint