The Importance of Monitoring Your Site for Uptime

If you run a small personal blog and your site isn’t profit driven, you probably aren’t very concerned with the uptime of your website. If, on the other hand, you run a larger ecommerce operation and every minute of downtime equates to money lost, then uptime should be of primary concern.

What Causes Website Downtime?

You may think that your site isn’t prone to downtime, but the fact of the matter is that every site is at risk. There are a number of factors that can contribute to website downtime, including issues with your hosting provider, incompatibility, faulty code, broken links and a variety of other issues that can wreak havoc on the normal functioning of your site. You need to make sure that there is someone out there checking for these issues and you need a website monitoring service to alert you when something does go wrong. If you don’t put proper measures into place, you’ll be sitting in the dark and could literally be losing thousands while your website is down and you won’t even know it.

What Constitutes Good Uptime?

In the world of website downtime, it can be hard to understand what constitutes acceptable uptime ratios. For example, 90 percent may sound like an acceptable number when in reality it’s not. If you only have an uptime rate of 90 percent, it means your site is down for approximately 36 days out of each year. No business can afford to lose a month of profits each and every year. Your goal should be to aim for an uptime ratio of at least 99 percent. If your website monitoring service alerts you that your uptime ratio is less than 99 percent, it’s time to start looking for the reason behind the downtime and then devise a plan to address it accordingly.

Does Response Time Matter?

A good website monitoring service won’t just monitor the uptime of your site; they will also monitor the response time of your site. Does response time really matter? Yes, in fact it does. Response time refers to the amount of time it takes for a visitor to get a response from your server. Response time can be influenced by poor programming or a slow web host. If your site has a slow response time, customers are going to become frustrated and go elsewhere for their needs. This also equates to lost profits. In essence, response time is just as crucial to your bottom line as downtime is so it’s important that you monitor for both.

Using the Right Monitoring Service

There are a variety of services and products on the Web that offer to monitor your site’s uptime for you. Because uptime and response time are crucial to your site’s bottom line, it’s essential that you choose a service that delivers quality. You don’t simply want free email notifications. If your site is going down or having problems with response times, you want to be notified by phone and SMS text message in addition to email. Only then can you be sure that you’re fully on top of any website downtime or response time issues.

Website downtime is inevitable. It happens to even the best of sites. What you do about it, however, can make a significant difference in how the downtime affects your company’s bottom line and its reputation.