Website Monitoring Services – What to Expect

In today's competitive online environment, downtime or inappropriate performance of your website can cost your business a lot. Website monitoring services became quite essential for businesses today to deal with such instances effectively. However, when it comes to choosing a website monitoring service, there are quite a lot of options available. Any mistake here will put your business’ reputation at stake.

Importance of website monitoring services: Poor server performance and website downtime are the most common problems that affect availability and functionality of the website. Simple issues like heavy traffic and malicious attacks may block the server and make the website unavailable. An effective monitoring service takes care of all these issues by keeping a check on every aspect that affects the performance and accessibility of the site. The moment it detects a problem in a server, website or in any other application of the website, it notifies the website owner and thus helps in the instant rectification of the problem.

Factors to consider while hiring a website monitoring service: Each monitoring company provides its own package of features. Below is the list of things to be considered while choosing a website monitoring service.

What should be monitored? Among all the things that need monitoring, server monitoring is the basic as well as the important one. In order to know the performance and status of the website, checking the HTTP/HTTPS web servers is very important.

Monitoring email servers like SMTP, IMAP and POP3 is also crucial as email is the crucial communication tool used by businesses these days. Any downtime, non-delivery, or delayed delivery of email can severely impact business operations. Other servers like FTP, DNS and MySQL can also be monitored to verify proper operation of the server.

Apart from servers, monitoring services like PING, DNS Lookup, etc. is also crucial to ensure availability of your website and its applications.

Monitoring from multiple locations: If your website is meant for a global audience, then it is crucial to make sure that it is accessible and performing well from any location across the world. Reputed service providers have monitoring centers at various locations across the globe, which enables them to verify your website's performance in those regions.

Monitoring frequency: Monitoring services check your website quite frequently and you can determine the time intervals in which you want your site to be checked. You can choose different time intervals like 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 30, and 60 minutes while setting up the monitoring service. The monitoring frequency differs from service provider to service provider.

Real-time updates and customized alerts: Whenever the monitoring service detects a problem it alerts the website administrator about the issue. You can also receive real-time updates about the performance of servers which makes it easy for you to see the trends in the server performance. These kinds of updates and alerts not only help you to resolve the issue as quickly as you can, but also increases the credibility of your site by making it always available to the customers.

Comprehensive reports: Besides monitoring the performance of various servers, monitoring services also note the uptime and downtime patterns of websites. They store all the data related to the frequency of occurrence of these instances and send clear reports that help the owner to check the pattern and control the latency of the server and other web applications.

Dealing with false alerts: Good monitoring services include accessing the client servers from multiple points of presence to avoid false alerts. As this service helps you get accurate alerts, you will avoid anxiety and wastage of time on false alerts.

These are a few of the important things you can expect from a website monitoring service. Besides these, also make sure that the service provider is reliable as well as reputed in order to get better services.