Many people rely on server logs to monitor uptime or will ping a server from an in-house location. Unfortunately, this is not adequate as there can be many reasons a website is unavailable.

In shared hosting environments* your bandwidth and availability is potentially at the mercy of dozens of other websites that may or may not be commercial in nature. However, even in dedicated hosting environments outages occur, modems to go off line, routers fail, and networks go down, making it important to monitor availability regardless of your environment.

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I am often asked about the essentials of setting up a web site. While the discussion usually runs toward getting the right URL, site architecture, and navigation, I don’t usually get to talk about another essential part of setting up your website, web analytics.

Web analytics is essential to getting your site off the ground. It helps you gauge your progress and, if you record the changes you make as you move forward, web analytics will help you evaluate the effect of those changes over time.

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