Website Monitoring Basics 101

Here at the Alertra blog we talk about things like uptime, web hooks, DNS, and other terms that the average Joe may not be familiar with. It goes without saying that in navigating the world of website monitoring, you kind of have to learn a second language and understanding the benefits of what such a service can offer can be hard if you don't know what you're reading about. For those of you who are interested in website monitoring services but just don't understand why you need a website monitor, why they are so important, or what certain terms and words mean, this post is for you…

What is Website Monitoring Service?

The first thing you need to understand when you get into an online business is that uptime is money, which means downtime is money lost. Downtime is the term that is used to refer to any period of time that your visitors can't reach your site, regardless of what the cause may be. A website monitoring service alerts you the moment your site goes down.

Now you may be wondering why you need a service to do this. After all, if you go to visit your site and it's not coming up you can pretty much figure out that something is wrong on your own, right? The question is how long was the site down before you came to that conclusion? An hour? Four hours? If Amazon were to go down for four hours it would cost them nearly $16 million. Your site may not do the volume Amazon does, but every minute does count when it comes to lost profits. Wouldn't it be better to find out the moment your site goes down rather than hours after the fact? That's where website monitoring services come into play.

When you have a website monitoring service working for you, it's like having someone check your site's availability and functionality 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's impossible to do this manually. With a website monitor, however, it is done affordably and effectively and you get notified the second something goes wrong with your site, not hours later.

We'll continue this conversation next week, when we will be covering some words and terms that you will run into when researching website monitoring services and learning about everything these services have to offer.