Website snapshot tool

[kate-brownhill]

I am finding it increasingly common that some of our sites are down due to server problems. We use over 30 different web hosting companies so this is quite common now. We use Domain Punch to monitor the response from the sites every 30 minutes but of course the server still returns a 200 response even though sometimes there are problems with the MySQL db or other website problems. We recently had a small ecommerce site drop from Google due to the fact that we did not notice that it had lots of errors on the home page due to missing database (web hosting moved servers and 'forgot' to move the database). These got indexed and the rankings plummeted.

So, in an attempt to spot any problems as soon as they arise, I am looking for some sort of software solution that will, every day, go through the whole site portfolio and take a snapshot of the homepage and save it on a local drive for visual monitoring. I found a few that almost got it right, but they always had something wrong with them. for example, WebPageCaptorPro works but when it generates the thumbnails, it does not name them with the url so it’s impossible to match the jpeg to the site easily.

Does anyone have any other ideas or options?

 

[sdsinc]

A well-designed script should have error handling built-in ie: DB connection failure => send an E-mail to webmaster...

Since you say you use over 30 webhosts I assume your websites are scattered across shared hosting plans here and there. Then it would make sense to have your own (possibly managed) dedicated server. Benefits: more control, more resources, your own IP addresses and more stability. Possibly costs savings too.

 

[kate-brownhill]

There is no way we can have a dedi for that setup as we need the IP variation and also differing physical locations of the servers. Trust me, if I could that would be bliss. We do use a dedi for our main sites but not for these.