How Does Your Website Monitoring Service Detect Failures?

In the world of website monitoring and server monitoring, not all services are created equal. This is exemplified by how the various monitoring services on the Web actually perform their website monitoring functions. For example, if your site runs into a DNS outage, will your website monitor really know about it the second it happens? The only way to know that is to know how your monitoring service actually checks for website uptime and downtime. Here are some things to consider when choosing a website monitoring service to protect your website's uptime.

Is Your Website Monitoring Service Caching Your Name Server Lookups?

To ensure that your site is up and running as it should be, your website monitoring service needs to check your name servers on a constant basis. If they are caching your name server lookups instead of actually checking them, it's a gamble on how long it will take your provider to actually figure out that your site has encountered a problem. Instead of relying on their own technology to quickly inform you of a website outage, monitoring services that cache name server lookups must wait for your site's time-to-life (TTL) to expire. In the best of situations, this will take a few hours. In many cases, it can take days. Do you really want to have to wait days to figure out what's wrong with your site or that your site is actually experiencing a problem? If every minute of downtime equates to lost profits, hours or days of downtime are downright unacceptable. You need to make sure that you work with a monitoring service that doesn't just cache name server lookups. Your website monitor should have the technology to accurately check the status of your site's name servers around the clock.

How Many Locations is Your Site Being Monitored From?

In the world of website monitoring, there is such a thing as a false alert. If your website monitoring service doesn't have enough locations from which they monitor the status of your site, they won't really know if it's an issue with your site or if it's an issue with their connection. If your website monitor, on the other hand, employs servers across the globe and gets the same response at all of its locations, you can be pretty sure that the problem is with your website. Before signing up with any website monitoring service, you need to make sure that they have enough servers in place to actually provide you with the level of service and accuracy that your website needs.

How Much Do You Really Know About Your Website Monitoring Service?

When it comes to the monitoring of your website, transparency is key. Your website monitor should be more than willing to share their abilities and technologies with you, their customer. If a service isn't willing to share exactly how it performs a certain task, chances are that they have something to hide. The downtime of your website is too important to leave up to chance. Make sure you know exactly how your site will be monitored and how many servers will be monitoring your site before you decide on any website monitoring service provider.