Understanding the Need for External Website Monitoring Services

When your site goes down, you need to know about it the moment it happens. Better yet, you probably want to be alerted that your website’s performance and stability are having issues before a complete outage of the website occurs. The only possible way to catch website downtime before it happens is to partner with a quality website monitoring service.

Why External Website Monitoring?

There are various types of website monitoring services available for today’s website owners. These fall into two basic categories including internal website monitoring and external website monitoring. Why is external monitoring service the better choice?

If you have internal monitoring service, such as software running on your server, and the failure at hand brings your server down entirely or the issue is with connectivity to your server, the website monitoring solution you have in place is not going to be able to notify you regarding the problems. This is why you need an external monitoring solution. A separate partner in your fight against website downtime. One which has its own servers in multiple locations watching over your site and notifying you the moment a problem arises.

What Does External Website Monitoring Do?

External website monitoring service is a third-party website monitor that retrieves information from your website at set intervals, ensuring the site isn’t experiencing any performance issues or downtime. If performance issues or website downtime do arise, the website monitoring service alerts you regarding the problem at hand. How you are alerted depends on the service you use, but ideally you will be notified via SMS text message and phone calls in addition to email.

What to Look for In an External Website Monitoring Service

When looking for a quality website monitoring service, there are a few things you want to look for. First, you want a service that offers numerous servers in several locations spread across the globe to ensure continuity of your website’s monitoring coverage. You also want a service that checks your site frequently, at least every minute, for any issues that may arise so you can be notified of problems as quickly as possible. Flexible features and tools to help you utilize the service as much as possible are also important.

It is crucial to find a website monitoring service that has the ability to minimize your downtime by implementing the latest technologies and the broadest spectrum of protection possible. While you likely won’t find this in a free website monitoring service, what you do pay for a quality service will likely more than pay for itself over time in the lost profits it will save you from excessive website downtime.