The Importance of Monitoring

This morning, I received an e-mail from a graphics designer who’d found me via biznik. She was interested in looking at my work, but when she went to www.webpublishinggroup.com, all she got was a blank page. This was very puzzling to me as this website is a WordPress blog, and I’ve never had any trouble like this with WordPress.

Fortunately, the admin screens were working. I first upgraded to version 2.8 (the new automatic upgrade feature of WP is really fantastic!), but that didn’t fix the problem. Next, I checked out the theme page. There, it was reported that my theme was missing the template file. I re-installed the theme, and it looks like things are working again.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that somehow the template file was corrupted or deleted, effectively taking my website offline. I notified tech support at my web hosting company, but I’m not sure that there’s anything they can really do about it.

What this points out is the importance of monitoring your website. If you’re like me, you rarely check to see that a website is up and running, but failing to do so could reflect poorly on you and your business. Worst case, you could miss out on business opportunities.

My priorities just got re-arranged. This morning, I’m going to research website-monitoring services and sign up with one that will make sure that this website stays online.