08/13/2014

What You Should Be Looking for in a Website Monitoring Service

Here at Alertra, we tout the features of our website monitoring service. After all, when you have a service that can truly help website businesses succeed and improve their bottom line profits, it is only natural to toot your own horn. What many people don't understand, however, is why some of the features we offer at Alertra are so important. If you want to truly understand the benefits that website monitoring service has to offer, then you need to understand why certain features are so important.

Constant Monitoring

With most website monitoring services, you can set the intervals at which you want your site checked. Some services allow you to check your site as often as every 60 seconds. At Alertra, however, we use Alertra Synapse™ technology, which allows us to check your site every few seconds. When you consider the fact that each minute of downtime equates to lost profits, it is easy to see how every second counts. The sooner you are notified of an issue, the sooner you can go to work getting your site back online.

Method of Communication

Alertra notifies its customers of downtime in a number of ways. Our customers can be contacted via phone, SMS text message, email, and Google Talk (XMPP). Some services only contact their customers via email. The problem with this is that if your site's server goes down, it is possible for your email to go down with it. This means that if you are sent an email from your website monitoring service to notify you of the issue, you won't receive the email until the issue has been resolved. That is why multiple modes of communication are critical.

Number of Servers and Server Locations

At Alertra, we have multiple servers located across the globe. Why is this important? Let's say a single server goes down. Another server can pick up and fill in until the issue has been fixed. But what if there is a natural disaster and the entire server center is wiped out? With servers located all over the globe, there is a failsafe for such a situation. If you are working with a monitoring service that has only one server location or, worse yet, just one server, your site's monitoring isn't really being protected.

Try Before Buying

A quality website monitoring service will be willing to put their money where their mouth is. That is why at Alertra we offer our customers a free trial. We know that once they see the value of our service and what we can offer, they will discover the service can actually pay for itself in the long run. Companies that make you pay for the service before actually trying it may have something to hide or may know their services are lacking.