01/20/2015

4 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Run a Website Without Website Monitoring Service in Place

If you are like most online businesses, you have put a lot of money and effort into making sure your site looks great, is hosted with a reliable hosting provider, is optimized for the search engines, and is secure from malicious hackers and attacks. You may even be paying for the outsourcing of IT management and maintenance. Unfortunately, if you think this is enough, you are sorely mistaken. If you really want to be able to see your site the way customers do, you can't do it from inside your network. You need a third-party website monitoring service put into place to do the work for you. Here are the top four reasons why website monitoring services are crucial in today's Internet age.

1. Lost Profits

There are a lot of elements that go into the functioning of a website and if a single glitch occurs, it can bring your entire site down with it. That could lead to a significant loss of profits, especially if the website downtime occurs during peak business hours. If your website isn't up and running, you can't capture leads or sales. Trying to figure out what went wrong and where on your own can turn into a timely and very costly nightmare, all of which can be avoided with a quality website monitoring service in place.

2. You Can't Count on Your Hosting Provider to Do It For You

No matter how good your hosting provider is, they aren't going to put forth the effort or resources necessary to effectively monitor your website for you. While some hosting providers do have monitoring in place on their own servers, if their server goes down and they are notified, that doesn't necessarily mean they will take the time to notify and update you as to the issue and the status of getting things back online. In some cases, they may not reach out to you until after the problem has been resolved and the damage has been done. You need your own website monitoring in place to ensure that your site is up and running at all times so you can put contingency plans in place if needed.

3. Immediate Notification

If your site were to go down right now, how long would it take before you became aware of it? Worse yet, what if you didn't discover the problem until a customer or potential client called you notifying you that your site wasn't accessible .If you don't have quality website monitoring in place, it may take up to a few hours or even longer to find out if your site goes down. Since every minute your site is down equates to a potential for lost profits, you need to do what you can to ensure that you are notified the moment your site goes down and not a second later.

4. Increased Security

While a website monitoring service in and of itself can't prevent hackers or security issues, a quality service will let you know as soon as it happens. The faster your response time is, the less chance there is that your customers will be exposed to the hacker's malicious attempts. External website monitoring service is a cost-effective tool that can help you ensure that your website is up and running when your customers need it and expect it to be. Not only do you get early warning when something goes wrong, but you can get to work faster to fix any imminent issues or issues that may be on the horizon, whether near or far.