07/13/2016

5 Reasons to Choose Alertra for Website Monitoring

It has been said many times that in the world of website monitoring, not all services are created equal. There is no question that there is a plethora of services to choose from when it comes to finding a company to protect your website from unnecessary downtime. The problem is you don’t just want any company. You want the company that can provide you with the most advanced comprehensive protection from downtime. Why should you choose Alertra to do the job? In the past we have provided you with valuable advice regarding how to choose the perfect website monitoring service. Here we give you five reasons why Alertra is the service you’re looking for.

1. We Allow You to Create Your Account and Go

When you choose Alertra for your website monitoring, there is no complicated software to install and it doesn’t take days for your account to become active. The moment you create your website monitoring account, your site begins receiving the 24/7 protection that we provide. Even if your site happens to go down just an hour after your account is activated, you ’ll be protected and you’ll know about it via our email, phone, and SMS text alerts.

2. We Make Redundancy a Good Thing

When it comes to the monitoring of your website, redundancy is actually a good thing. You want multiple servers in place located across a wide span of locations to ensure that your site is always being watched and can be checked from multiple locations. Alertra has multiple servers spanning the globe. If one server or location goes down, there is another location that will pick up the monitoring of your site until the issue is resolved. This means your site is always protected and being watched for downtime, even if a server location faces a natural disaster and complete power outage.

3. Customization is Key

If you want to get the most from your website monitoring service, you need to be able to customize that service to meet your specific needs. Alertra does not take a “one size fits all” approach to website monitoring. We offer a number of plans to choose from and the ability to customize your protection with the creation of event-driven webhooks. This means that if your site goes down, your protection can go well beyond just the receipt of notifications. For example, with Alertra’s webhooks, if your site experiences an outage Alertra can call an external API to switch your DNS to a backup site, ensuring that any downtime experienced is kept to an absolute minimum. You can even customize how you are notified of a website outage. For example, you can choose to be notified via email and SMS text message first and if a response isn’t received within a specified period of time, your account can be set to begin calling the appropriate people to get them working on the problem sooner rather than later, no matter what time of the day or night the downtime may occur.

4. You Have the Ability to Tag Your Devices

We know that your monitored devices can and do work very differently from one another. Because of this we offer the ability to create tags. With tags in place, you can start or stop maintenance of devices that are tagged as “Servers” or you can tag devices as “Critical” and receive a weekly uptime report for all of the devices with the “Critical” tag.

5. Say Goodbye to False Alerts and DNS Caching

Responding to downtime costs your company time and money. That’s why we don’t send false alerts. We will wait for consecutive failures from three different server locations before we send you the alert that your site is down, ensuring that you really are facing a downtime issue before an alert is sent. We also don’t use DNS caching for the monitoring of your site. While quite a few website monitoring services simply rely on DNS lookups, we realize that type of monitoring won’t recognize outages related to the DNS until the time-to-live expires, which could be 24 hours or more. Instead, we do a fresh lookup every single time we check your site, ensuring that all outages are detected as soon as they start. After all, no company can afford to wait 24 hours or more to be notified of DNS related downtime.

The Bottom Line

While there are indeed a number of services to choose from when it comes to monitoring your site for downtime, Alertra takes monitoring to a completely different level. We offer the customization and state-of-the-art services you need to ensure that your downtime really is kept to a minimum and isn’t just reduced. When every minute counts, that can mean quite a difference to your company’s bottom line.