This came up in a conversation that I was having yesterday and I thought that I was worth a short note.

Many website monitoring companies, including microNOC, offer the ability to test the actual content that your website is serving to visitors, instead of just checking that the server is up and running, which can give a false sense of security.

An example of the false sense of security that can come from just monitoring the server and not the content is if your home page for some reason isn’t served correctly, which could be caused by a file being missing (like header.php or footer.php in wordpress) or by a database error (in the case of database driven websites). Either of those problems will still result in a page being served, but the content will either not be there, or be useless, even if the server itself is responding to the website monitoring query that everything is ok.

By checking actual content on the site, a website monitoring service will verify that a word or group of words, are actually being served up by the webserver. If they don’t show up during checks, then there is something wrong and an alert will be sent out.

There are many different varieties of website content checking that can be used, but the one that we offer even with our Free Website Monitoring accounts is to check for an image and a link. For our free accounts, we will check to make sure that a link from our Link To Us page is on your server, and is correctly served to clients from your server. If there is a problem and we don’t see that link when we are testing your server, we conclude that your content isn’t being served and we notify you. Our recommendation is that the link be placed in the footer of the page, or be served out of a database so that you can verify that the database link is working as well.

And if you are using our free service, don’t forget that having a link to us on your home page that we are monitoring qualifies you for our free iPod Shuffle monthly giveaway.

Hope you have a great day, with no outages.