If That, Then What? .... IFTTT - Site Down Notification

By Tim Emineth -

We went on a double date with some friends, and while the ladies where talking my friend Nathan told me that he was playing with the IFTTT.com website and doing some pretty cool stuff with it. Such as getting emails on any new Craigslist post for certain arcade machines he is in the market for. Also the ability to auto un-mute your phone when you get home. (which is what I need, sometimes I play guitar at church and mute my phone then forget it that it is muted until late Monday)

So as an SEO service provider I was thinking of a good way that I can leverage some day to day maintance issues that I need to be aware of.

One of the issues that is relatively hard to monitor in our busy lives is when your website goes down. Your website could be down for hours, days or weeks if you don't visit often.  It's embarrasing to find or worse yet, a potential client emails or calls you to tell you your site is down. At least if you knew ahead of time, you could at least make something up. (Yeah I know it is down it is currently under maintenance, or my web guy is aware and is fixing it, etc..)

So this is how to use IFTT.com and receive a text when your site goes down and comes back up.

You need a free pingdom account so go here – https://www.pingdom.com/free

Enter your email address and create a password:

Click the black button “Nah, I’m good the way things are”

Enter your website:

Fill out form:

Click on your website then the add Checks Button:

Ok now that this is done you will see this page:

Next you need to setup an IFTTT.com account:

Go to https://ifttt.com/ and click on sign up (Big Blue Button can't miss it)

After you have created an account then go here: https://ifttt.com/recipes/129384-text-me-if-the-website-goes-down-and-when-it-comes-back-up

Click on the top Connect button and sign in to your Gmail account and click accept:

Click on Done

Click on the Connect SMS button:

Enter phone number:

Enter Pin from the text your recieve on your phone:

Hit Connect then Done

Click add on the next page:

Now you will recieve a text when your site is down.  By default your site is checked every 70 mins.