As we mentioned last week, Alertra has introduced powerful new webhook tools to help customers handle downtime. If you want to see the power of webhooks in action, you simply need to follow us on Twitter, where we are monitoring 50 of the most popular sites as a benchmark for the online community. Want to know when some of the biggest sites are going down and how quickly they get back up and running? Alertra is making that information readily available.

Here at Alertra, it is not uncommon for customers to ask us if there is any way that we can help them when we detect that their website has gone down. After being asked this question numerous times, we realized that it would make our customers lives much easier if we could change the DNS entry for their website during an outage so that it would point to the IP address of a backup server where the site would be live and functional.

Just a few decades ago the Internet played no role in the success of a business. Nowadays, however, websites and social media have become integral to your business's success. A significant amount of business is generated from the Internet. In fact, it has been estimated that in some industries, 90 percent of all purchases begin with an online search. This means your search engine rankings are crucial to your business's profit margin. However, if your site's performance isn't up to par, your search engine rankings may take a hit.

One would think that as the Internet grows out of its infancy and new technologies are being deployed, website downtime would have become a thing of the past. The truth is that website outages are still a common occurrence. In fact, an increasing number of sites seem to go "dark" lately, with various reasons for the site outages. The outages themselves, however, are not the only problem. How companies respond to the outages and how quickly they are resolved have a direct impact on how the public perceives the site's reliability and professionalism.

The Web has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Those who operate online businesses understand that uptime is vital to the success of your site. Every single minute of downtime equates to lost profits. How much your site loses when it's down will depend on a number of factors, but the truth is that any amount of downtime means that your profits are indeed at risk. Because of this, it is crucial that you know the moment your site goes down, and not a minute later.

The holiday season may be here and gone, but that doesn't mean that we don't want our online stores to thrive the rest of the year. While there are a number of things you can do to help your online store flourish the year round, website monitoring services are an often-overlooked tool in your success arsenal. How can website monitoring help your online store's success? The answers to this question are pretty straightforward.

If your website is monetized, you need to ensure that you avoid downtime at all costs. Every minute of downtime equates to lost profits. How much you lose depends on how profitable your site is, but any amount of money lost is too much. From startups to larger companies, there are some basic mistakes that can lead to significant downtime. Here are five steps you need to be taking to ensure that your site doesn't encounter any unnecessary downtime (and unnecessary profits lost).

Companies, both large and small, understand the importance of maintaining an operational website, especially on days when the public is going to be flocking to the site's pages. While maintenance and some downtime issues are inevitable, ensuring that your site is ready for the traffic it will receive on busy days is a non-negotiable part of successfully operating a site. Unfortunately, the Sundance Film Festival's website wasn't ready on the day the site was opened for ticket sales to the public.

Since the advent of the Internet, the world as we know it has been changed. How we communicate, shop, and do business has evolved to adapt to this new Internet era. Good customer service is no longer enough to compete in today's marketplace. Your website can make or break your company's reputation in a heartbeat. While there are a number of factors that will contribute to your site's success, the availability and performance of your site are undoubtedly two of the most important factors that you need to focus on.

Almost everyone knows that website downtime is costly, to both a company's bottom line and its reputation. When your site goes down, you need to know about it the moment it happens. Most businesses realize the value of utilizing a quality website monitoring service to keep an eye on the uptime of their sites, ensuring they are the first to know if and when site downtime does occur. What many website owners do not realize, however, is that not all website monitoring services are created equal.