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I recently made a pretty big mistake and I should know better, I had started a new smaller giveaway site called Giveaway Contests less than two months ago and it has already grown to 6,000+ visits in it’s first month. But unlike my more established sites, I didn’t setup site monitors on it yet and when I was testing Cloudflare on the site I didn’t notice that it had detected wrong DNS IP address and screwed up the DNS for the site causing it to not resolve properly in DNS.
This one mistake cost me 60 visits per day over 11 days, which is more than 660+ potential visits, new readers and about 3 dozen giveaway submissions which about 6-8 are posted daily. As you can see the day after the mistake was corrected traffic immediately jumped back up to near pre-mistake levels, but this was a huge risk and this was enough time for Google to destroy the indexing for the site.
As a result it is imperative that you have some sort of website monitors in place, I do use Monitive for my alerts and reporting and leverage the free plan for all my sites just forgot to add Giveaway Contests to my monitoring.
So let this be a lesson to others out there who run blogs, especially self hosted blogs not running on cloud platforms, there is nobody really monitoring your site to see if it’s up and you won’t know unless you are checking it constantly. Be sure to setup any one of the free monitors which typically give you 5 minute interval or more frequent checks, if you want real time monitoring or SMS alerts there is usually a subscription plan but email and Twitter DM alerts are typically free to have some monitors in place.
You really can’t afford not to have a monitor in place for your website or blog.
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