11/14/2016

Types of Website Monitoring Services That You May Need To Avoid

In today's technology environment, the success or failure of any business mostly depends on consumers experience on the online websites or applications. There are many factors that influence the consumers impression on a particular brand. When they take the big decision to abandon a known brand for its competitor, it could be because they might have had bad digital experience while working with your website. Users come with varied expectations and the way they interact with the website is also different. It is critical to provide them with good browsing experience by tracking different aspects of the website because that is what will decide your business's bottom line. This makes website monitoring service as important as a website itself. If you are not aware of the downtime or performance issues and keep the site non-productive for long duration then you cannot expect optimal amount of business to happen online. Your investments and efforts on the site becomes ineffectual since you are not generating income to the extent possible. Finding a quality monitoring service provider is also critical as sometimes you may end up choosing the wrong service for your website.

Free Monitoring Services

While searching for website monitor services you many come across providers offering free uptime monitor service or limited time free site monitoring services. These options are feasible only for comparison and getting exposure to variety of services but not recommended for profit driven websites. While getting free service is an advantage, not many prefer to use it because it is unsafe for their business to entrust the responsibility of their website into the hands of low quality providers. Choosing limited free services is also risky because these providers move you to a limited capability service that could neglect reporting issues not covered in the free plan.

Monitoring Services With limited Abilities

Before choosing a monitoring service, it is important to know the fundamentals, which means understand clearly what type of monitoring service and alerting capabilities are needed. You cannot expect quality service from all providers because comprehensive monitoring requires skill, abilities and resources. Many low cost providers come up with one-size-fits-all methodology where they implement a few common services required by most sites. These providers may not address the user requirements in some industries and it's possible they cannot ensure quality of their service. While in some other cases, the providers manage their entire clientele with limited resources maintaining one or two servers in few locations. Such providers cannot ensure scalable, reliable, efficient and fast service to the websites.

Importance of Avoiding Wrong Monitoring Service for Your Websites

It is not a good idea to consider cost as priority and compromise your website goals for low quality service. With free and low cost services you can cut down few bucks on monitoring, but the losses that you will incur in other aspects will be significant. Free service providers may not keep tabs on your website uptime at regular intervals, instead they might be checking the status less frequently. When the site remains down or doesn't perform well, it will be a cumulative loss on business revenues as well as wastage of investment on site development, hosting, and technical resources. The losses will be more substantial if the site remain down during peak hours because you are unaware of the situation until the providers inform you after one or two hours. On top of it, if alert is sent via email, you may not even notice it immediately. It may take another few more hours before you realize and start restoring the website to normality.

How a service notifies you is also important because some may alert only through emails which you may not check in timely manner. Unless you know the status of downtime immediately, you cannot take prompt action on outages or performance errors that could cost business money. Make assessment based on quality not on price because it is worth spending few dollars per month on a quality site monitoring service that can effectively protect your website from downtime and performance issues.