09/13/2013

How Website Monitoring Services Can Protect Your Site from Hackers

We live in a day and age where new websites are being launched each and every day. Technology is moving at a pace that makes it nearly impossible to keep up. Unfortunately, not all of that technology is good technology. As website tools advance, so do the malicious technologies that hackers use to exploit websites. While website monitoring offers a number of benefits to webmasters and website owners, one of those benefits is another layer of protection against malicious activity.

Hackers Can Do More Than Just Take Down Your Site

The Internet is, for the most part, unchartered territory. Search engines are cracking down to ensure that the information that the websites that they refer their visitors to load fast and are relevant to the search terms search engine visitors are looking for. It has become harder over the years to get a website ranked by the search engines. Quite a bit of money and effort is put into the average website's SEO. Unfortunately, if a hacker decides to toy with your site, it can seriously damage the search engine rankings you have been able to achieve.

The majority of search engine traffic comes from the Google website. Google is very clear that they only want to list the fastest and most relevant web pages in their search listings. Competitors or bored hackers may take advantage of this fact by slowing down your website load times with DDoS attacks or by inserting script into your site that can affect its performance and relevance. A good website monitoring service can detect this and notify you the moment your site begins to act up.

How a Website Monitor Can Save Your Search Engine Rankings from Hackers

If a hacker or competitor launches a DDoS attack against your site, your site's performance is going to slow down drastically before your site goes offline completely. A good website monitor will notify you as soon as performance issues present themselves. This will give you the time that you need to locate the problem and rectify it, thwarting the hacker's efforts to do damage to your site or its rankings. If your site does go down, a good website monitor will ensure that you are the first to know, and not the last. This will allow you to get your site back up and running as quickly as possible. While search engines are likely to forgive short periods of downtime, they aren't likely to be as forgiving if your site is offline for an extended period of time. When it comes to website downtime, time is of the essence. You want to make sure you know the moment your site goes down so you can fix it. A website monitoring service can ensure that you are armed with the information you need.

The last thing you want is to put money, time and effort into SEO only to have a hacker destroy the search engine rankings you have worked so hard for. Alertra customers will know if something is amiss with their websites. Those who do not yet have monitoring services in place may want to weigh the dangers on the Web against the minimal cost of quality monitoring service.