If you have a website or e-commerce, whether it's on Shopify or otherwise, you know that your site can sell thanks to a whole bunch of machines linked together: servers connected to the internet.
And even if Shopify is a very robust solution, has many servers all over the world, we call it a global cloud. It may happen that one of the servers breaks down and if unfortunately your site was on one of its servers, it will no longer be able to appear for your customers and it will be impossible for them to order.
What is updown.io?
This is where updown.io comes in , a small and inexpensive web tool that will allow you to “monitor”, ie follow in real time, whether your site is “live” or not.
Updown.io will simply program a kind of little robot that will do a test every hour, minute, or whatever time frame that suits you, to check if your site is online.
And if your site returns the correct code, code 200 in the web language, then updown.io will simply know that your site is indeed accessible for all your customers and that there is no server problem.
Of course, it is important to test the homepage first because on Shopify, it is very rare that a particular page is unavailable.
Benefits of updown.io
The main advantage of updown.io is its extreme ease of use. No need to have done polytechnic or know how to code to use it.
Do you know the web address, the url, of your e-commerce site? Do you know how to create an account with a login password? Then you will know how to use updown.io. Simple and effective therefore.
It is possible to do a check every 15 seconds on your site. And while it's not necessary with Shopify hosting, it's still nice that this feature is available.
And of course, updown.io works as well whether you are using an https or http site, i.e. with or without an SSL certificate .
price of updown.io
Once again, updown.io surprises us in a good way with a call price of zero euros. And yes, 100% free for at least one merchant site . Well, that's not entirely true. updown.io works with a credit system and gives you 100,000 credits when you sign up.
That is to say that if you only have one e-commerce site and you test the site every hour, you will be able to last 4166 days. That's a little over 11 years old.
And frankly, given the quality of hosting at Shopify, no need to test more often. Afterwards, if you have created many e-commerce sites , you may need more credits. But hey, the updown.io site accepts many payment methods, including the famous bitcoin and altcoins like ethereum and litecoin!
Updown.io is also compatible with many web services like Zapier, whatsapp or Slack that allow you to automate notifications and monitoring of your sites.
