5 Reasons to Monitor Your Website Remotely

Most businesses put a lot of effort into making sure their website looks good, is hosted on reliable servers or ISPs, and is secure from hackers. And they pay for IT staff to manage and maintain their online presence. But sadly this often isn’t enough. The truth is that you can’t see your website the way your customers do from inside the network. In fact, what your customers see often depends on the Internet outside of your business and your hosted ISP.

Using a website monitoring service provides you the full picture of your website performance - from your customers point of view. But that isn’t the only reason to use a website monitor. Here are the five key reasons you’ll want to sign up, or improve, your website monitoring today.

1. Lost revenue . A single technical glitch on a website can cost significant lost revenue. Especially if it is timed badly (and it usually is isn’t it?). If your website is down you can’t capture any online sales, or provide directions, store hours, phone numbers, email addresses, or product information.  If you add in the time lost trying to resolve the problem the event becomes even more costly. Monitoring your website externally will save you time and money.

2. Your ISP doesn’t do it . If you host your website with an ISP you may think they already do monitoring. And they do - on their own servers and services. If their server goes down they will know and fix the problem, they might even apologize for it afterward if you were affected. But your ISP has no way to know whether your website is  fully accessible to your customers or not. On that front you are alone, unless you’ve contracted a service provider to monitor your site remotely.

3. Early notification. How long would it take your IT staff to notice that your website wasn’t available to certain customers? Maybe they get a jump in technical support questions, or worse they get called by your customer support division with a huge list of complaints about customers not being able to access it. What if your IT manager got a SMS or email alert within minutes of a problem? That early notification could save sales, even the company's reputation. What if the IT staff didn’t answer the message? External monitoring services would have escalated the outage up a designated list until someone did answer. With early notification you don’t rely on your customer’s telling you about the issue, or have a single point of failure within the company.

4. Individual services. Frequently it isn’t a whole website that fails. Often it is a single service or application like POP3, FTP, or HTTPS, or a link to an externally hosted shopping cart. With external monitoring you can be sure each service or application is properly linked. This is especially important when it is hosted somewhere else and you don’t have insight into their status. If they go down, or the link gets broken, you’ll be able to fix it or handle the outage immediately rather than wait to see the complaints and frustrations of your customers.

5. Security.  External monitoring alone doesn’t prevent hacks or security breaches. But it will let you know as soon as it happens. The faster your response the less chance your customers will be exposed to whatever the hacker’s have decided to do to your website or services.The last thing you want is for a customer to arrive at your website and be faced with a screenshot of a gas mask, hard rock music, and a banner apologizing for hacking you (true story).

External website monitoring services provide a cost-effective method to ensure your online presence is ready for your customers and provides you early warning when something goes wrong. To get started today just click here to sign up for a free 30-day trial with Alertra.