Should You Trust Your Web Host for Adequate Website Downtime Monitoring?

There are a number of companies operating in the world of the Web that offer website monitoring services to online business owners. While most website operators understand the need for a quality website monitoring service, not all online business owners understand why they should pay extra for a third-party service when their web host offers to monitor their websites free of charge. If you’ve left the monitoring of your website up to your hosting provider, there are a few things you need to take into consideration.

1. The Monitoring of Your Website’s Uptime Is Not Your Hosting Provider’s Priority

Since every minute of downtime can spell disaster for your online business, and can cause things like lost profits, lost credibility, and a hit to your search engine rankings, you want to make sure that downtime is kept to an absolute minimum. This means partnering with a provider who makes the monitoring of your site’s uptime and prompt notification of downtime their number one priority. The only way to ensure that your site’s uptime is top priority is to partner with a provider who specializes in website and server monitoring. Your hosting provider’s priority is to profit from the hosting of your site, not to minimize your profit loss or other damage caused by any website downtime that your site may encounter.

2. Who Do The Uptime Stats Matter More To?

Can you be sure your web host will notify you of every instance of downtime that your site experiences? After all, your hosting provider offered you an uptime guarantee. If they fail to maintain the uptime percentage that they promised you, they are going to owe you a refund (no matter how small), so it’s not really in their best interests to paint an accurate picture of your site’s uptime statistics if high levels of downtime are being incurred. On the other hand, it is the job of a website monitoring service to notify you of every instance of downtime, no matter how short in duration or what the cause may be, so you know exactly what your uptime stats look like. This is the only way to get an accurate picture of how your site is performing as far as downtime is concerned.

3. How Is Your Site Monitored?

If you are leaving your website monitoring to your hosting provider, you need to question exactly how your site is monitored. Is it monitored through software that is hosted on the same server as your site? If so, if that server goes down, you won’t know about the downtime until the server is back up, if you are notified of the issue at all, which means you lose precious time when it comes to putting your failsafe plans into play if necessary.

Website Monitoring Is an Investment

While you may be opting to use your site’s hosting provider to notify you of downtime due to the fact that you think you just don’t’ need to incur another business expense, what you need to realize is that a website monitoring service really isn’t an expense in the true sense of the word. It’s more like an insurance policy, or even an investment. In many cases, website monitoring service can pay for itself by saving you lost profits from excessive amounts of downtime. In fact, by reducing the duration of just one episode of downtime, the service can more than pay for itself for the cost of the entire year.