Here at Alertra we frequently discuss the importance of monitoring your website for downtime. We often remind our readers that website downtime equates to lost profits and that the only way to truly protect your online business’s bottom line is to minimize the downtime your website experiences. However, downtime is not the only thing that you need to worry about when it comes to lost customers, a drop in search engine rankings, and lost profits. Website performance also plays an important role in the success of your online business.

Almost everyone who owns a website or operates one knows what website monitoring service is and what it entails, for the most part. The details, however, are often misunderstood or blurred and confused with other website services. If you want to truly understand the nature of website monitoring services and how such a service can be put to work to protect your online business’s profits, you need answers to the most frequently asked website monitoring questions.

Most online business owners know that website monitoring is critical to the success of a website and protects their company’s bottom line. When your website goes down, you need to know about it sooner rather than later, and preferably the minute it happens. Chances are, if you own or operate a website, you realize the importance of being the first to know when downtime does occur. What you may not understand, however, is how website monitoring services differ and how to choose the best website monitoring service for your site.

It seems that there are an abundance of website monitoring services offering “free” website monitoring on the Web. Of course, this brings to light the question, why should you pay for something you can get for free? Before you decide to forego a website monitoring company that is up front with its pricing and opt for one of these free website monitoring services, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

Website monitoring services have definitely evolved over the years. In the not-so-distant past, the companies that designed websites offered customers “maintenance” packages in order to drive recurring revenue. Oftentimes these maintenance packages included website monitoring and uptime monitoring reports in addition to hit reports and other similar services. It wasn’t too long before online businesses realized that the services they were paying for really didn’t offer any real value, yet they still realized the importance of uptime and website monitoring.

There are a number of ways in which a website owner can ensure the stability and uptime of his or her website. In fact, there are so many tools being offered across the web that navigating through them and understanding the differences between them can be quite a time-consuming undertaking. Let’s take load testing tools for example. Many people are under the impression that load testing tools can replace the need for a website monitoring service. To say that is true would be akin to saying the need for a mop negates the need for a vacuum cleaner in one’s home.

As the popularity of the “cloud” increases, more and more entrepreneurs and businesses are turning to cloud based hosting solutions for their website hosting needs. With increased popularity comes increased awareness of the pros and cons of this particular type of hosting service. Before you can decide whether or not cloud based web hosting is right for you and how it will (or will not) affect your site’s downtime, you need to become familiar with exactly what this type of hosting is, what it offers, and what the benefits and drawbacks can be in the cloud.

If you talk to the average person who has a bit of knowledge about website monitoring services and ask them what website monitoring entails, they will tell you that these services check to see if your website is down and let you know when an outage of your website occurs. While on the surface that is an accurate description, quality website monitoring service goes beyond that simple explanation. The Internet is ever-evolving, as are the technologies used by the websites that inhabit it.

When you signed up for your current hosting plan, you were probably promised or even guaranteed a certain amount of uptime, such as 99 percent or 99.9 percent, giving you the confidence that your website would almost always be up and available whenever your customers wanted access to it. There are some things that you need to take into consideration, however, before you can put much stock into that uptime percentage you were promised.

In the world of the Web, uptime percentages and stats are becoming more and more important. Websites that face unusually high amounts of downtime or perform poorly are the sites that are destined to fail. The cut-throat environment of the Internet means that online companies are now doing everything they can to improve their uptime stats, and that includes employing quality website monitoring services. Why is website monitoring so important and how can it help your website’s uptime? Here are some things you need to keep in mind…