How Does Website Monitoring Service Work?

Most ecommerce entrepreneurs know that website monitoring service is crucial to the success of their websites. What they don’t always know is how external website monitoring works or the differences between the types of website monitoring available. Before you can be sure you have the right website monitoring service in place on for your site, you need to familiarize yourself with the facts pertaining to the different types of website monitoring and how these services work.

What You Don’t Want

Not all website monitoring service is created equal. A lower-end monitoring service isn’t going to provide you with the protection your site needs from website performance issues and downtime. Lower-end services may cost less, or nothing at all, but all these services essentially do is use a program that pings your website’s server, not your actual website.

This type of website monitoring service is only able to send low-level messages or data packets to see if they can access the server your site is hosted on. This does not allow the service to monitor your actual website or your site’s internal functions.

The problem with this type of website monitoring service is that the service is severely limited in scope and the level of protection it offers. For the majority of ecommerce entrepreneurs and website owners, this level of service is not enough. Instead, these professionals need to opt for a high-end website monitoring service.

What You Need from a Website Monitoring Service

A high-end website monitoring service utilizes a software program that is created to crawl your website in order to see if the site is available. The key word here is your “site” and not your site’s “server” during the crawling process. This is especially important if your site is hosted on a shared server.

During this process, the website monitoring service will not only check to see if your site is available, but it will also check the network connectivity of your server to see if it is also operational. This allows you the peace of mind of knowing that not only your server is up and running, but your site is operating properly as well. In addition, high-end website monitoring service will also monitor the performance of your site, oftentimes allowing you to fix a problem that could lead to downtime before the downtime actually occurs.

Making Sure You Have the Right Protection

Prior to implementing any type of website monitoring service, you need to investigate what methods the service uses and how it actually monitors your website’s uptime. You want to make sure that you go with a high-end service that leaves nothing to chance, protecting your site’s profits as well as its reputation.