When it comes to protecting your business, you know that insurance is a must. Even if you do not have a brick-and-mortar business and are not in need of property insurance or other similar physical insurance policies, you still likely invest in other forms of insurance such as errors and omissions policies and/or liability insurance. Another type of insurance that you should not do business without when doing business online is website monitoring.

Alertra has thousands of customers, but we only hear from a small percentage of them. Just the other day I looked at our customer list and found a customer that has been with us more than 10 years and none of us can recall them ever opening a ticket. That doesn't mean that the system admins have nothing to do though, we have a full day every day, including weekends and some vacations, answering your questions. We thought it might be fun and helpful to share some of them.

Website monitoring services are becoming increasingly popular. A number of companies have realized the value of such a service and how the service can protect a business's bottom line. There are still, however, some online entrepreneurs who do not understand how a website monitoring company can help them succeed online or how it is relevant to their particular online business. Before you decide whether or not a website monitoring service is right for your site, there are some things you should consider.

Some businesses tend to follow the line of thought that as Internet technology advances, website downtime will eventually become a thing of the past. The fact of the matter is that the only way website downtime is going to become a thing of the past is if those very same business owners take monitoring the uptime of their websites very seriously put action plans in place for when a site outage does occur.

IT budgets tend to be shrinking, and that is a fact of life that many businesses just have to deal with. What can be controlled, however, is what a company does with the money it does have. While implementing redundant systems may not be within a company's budget at the moment, monitoring the systems that are in place is a crucial step toward protecting a company from the losses it may suffer due to unplanned website downtime.

You would think with the accelerated advances in technology and our increased dependence on the World Wide Web, website downtime would have become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, this not the case. While customers expect 100 percent uptime, downtime is still a very real issue, making website monitoring service more important than ever. Even if you do everything within your power to avoid website downtime and keep your site up and available, there are factors at play that are beyond your control.

Some say that the best things in life are free, but in the real world we know that's not always the case. Sometimes you get what you pay for, especially when it comes to vital business services, and website monitoring services are no exception to that rule. If you know the importance of website monitoring and the role it plays in maximizing the uptime of your website, then you probably know that paying for a quality service that actually protects your site is a much better option than choosing a website monitoring service that doesn't cost anything, but may be found lacking.

We all know that website downtime often equates to lost profits for a business, but what happens when people use the site that goes down to make money? It causes a domino effect that sets the online community abuzz. That's exactly what happened last week when eBay went down for approximately three hours, leaving sellers in the lurch and frustrating bidders.

Here at Alertra, we tout the features of our website monitoring service. After all, when you have a service that can truly help website businesses succeed and improve their bottom line profits, it is only natural to toot your own horn. What many people don't understand, however, is why some of the features we offer at Alertra are so important. If you want to truly understand the benefits that website monitoring service has to offer, then you need to understand why certain features are so important.

We all know the importance of website uptime and how harmful website downtime can be, but what some don't realize is that even a partial outage of your site can equate to significant losses as well, as a follower of Alertra pointed out recently. If even just one page of your site goes down, one link doesn't work properly, it can have a drastic impact on profits.