01/20/2015

Website Monitoring Service is Crucial to Minimizing Website Downtime and Maximizing Profits

When it comes to ecommerce and making money on the World Wide Web, every minute of website downtime equates to lost profits. The best way to avoid this loss of profit is to do everything in your power to minimize the downtime that your website experiences each year, and that means having quality website monitoring in place.

How Do You Know When Your Site Goes Down?

You may have software running within your site to notify you if something goes awry, but if your entire server goes down how is that software going to get the message out to you? Or perhaps you check your site frequently throughout the day. Just because the homepage of your site is coming up in your browser doesn't mean your entire site is up and functioning as it should be. You may even think that traffic monitoring is enough to tell you if something is wrong with your site, but while a sudden decrease in traffic might let you know something has gone awry, it won't tell you where the problem is and it isn't likely to notify you in a timely manner. Your best bet for fighting extended periods of website or server downtime is to implement a website monitoring service to do all of the behind-the-scenes monitoring work for you.

Don't Count on Your Web Host to Notify You

If you think your web host will alert you if your site goes down, you may want to think twice. While a hosting provider may alert you if the issue is a prolonged one that was caused by something on their end, chances are they won't notify you immediately and if it's an issue within your site itself, they won't likely be able to notify you at all. Utilizing a third-party website monitoring service ensures that you will know the moment your site goes down, regardless of the reason, so you can take measures to get it back up as quickly as possible, avoiding an excessive loss of sales or leads due to downtime.

Not All Website Monitoring Services Are Created Equal

While there are a variety of website monitoring services available to choose from, you want to make sure your site has comprehensive protection, and that means utilizing a service that will protect your site from a variety of angles. Some of the best website monitoring services utilize a "crawling" approach, where the service crawls your entire website to ensure the site is available, looking for network connectivity as well as the proper functioning of your site. These services will also check your site at frequently intervals, as often as every minute, ensuring that you know about website downtime the moment it happens and not a minute later. While you may not be able to avoid website downtime completely, you can drastically reduce the amount of downtime your website faces by outsourcing the monitoring of your website to a quality website monitoring service. While the best services aren't usually free, they do tend to pay for themselves when you consider the lost profits that can be saved by eliminating the downtime you would experience without such a service in place.