How to Fight Website Downtime and Profit Loss with Website Monitoring

It is three in the morning and your website is down. The dreaded and inevitable curse of website downtime has occurred and until you fix it, your visitors are going to face frustration when they try to access your site’s offerings and your business is losing profits. The question is, how soon will you find out about the downtime? Will you find out about it when you wake up and finally make it to your computer to check your sales and emails, or will you find out about it when you get a phone call from an irate customer who can’t access your site? When downtime happens, you never want to be the last to know. What you need to do is put measures in place that will ensure you know about downtime the moment it occurs and not a second later. The sooner you know about website downtime the sooner you can get to work fixing it. Even better, you’d like to detect issues that can cause downtime before the downtime actually occurs. That is why you need a quality website monitoring service to partner with to ensure that your site experiences as much uptime as possible.

Using Monitoring Software

Let’s say you already have monitoring software running on your website. That software may alert you to some problems and allow you to fix downtime before it happens, but what if your site goes down without warning? Your software won’t do you any good because it won’t be able to notify you that your site has gone down since the server and software will have gone down with it. While monitoring software can be of use to you, in and of itself it is not enough to protect your site’s profits from downtime. This is where a quality website monitoring service comes into play.

Partnering with a Quality Website Monitoring Service

The good news is that even though the monitoring software that is running on your website’s server isn’t enough protection for your online business, there is an affordable solution to this problem. Third-party website monitoring services can notify you the moment your site goes down. These services retrieve pages from your server at set intervals and keep an eye on the performance of your site. If something goes awry, the service sends you an instant alert via email, phone call, and/or SMS text message.

If you’re running a dynamic website, knowing that your site’s server is responding to page requests just isn’t enough. You need to ensure that the database and application server are running as well. Quality website monitoring services will look for certain keywords on the retrieved page and as long as the keywords are coming from the database, you will know that the application is running properly and can communicate with the database. In addition, your service should have applications that use a series of URLs to step through a sequence of operations ensuring that your site is not only up, but that it also fully functional.

How Much Should You Pay for a Quality Website Monitoring Service?

The price for website monitoring can vary widely from one end of the spectrum to the other. Free website monitoring plans are almost always bare-bones services intended to lure you into paying for higher-priced packages. The biggest mistake you can make is to shop for a website monitoring service based on price alone. Instead, look at the features the service offers, the way in which it monitors your site and applications, how many locations it monitors from, and how the service will notify you if downtime does occur. Remember, website monitoring service is one of the few services that pay for itself over time. Since these services can drastically reduce the amount of downtime your site experiences, and each minute of downtime equates to profits lost, the money the service saves you in lost profits is likely to more than cover the cost of the service itself. As such, when choosing a service, cost should not be one of your determining factors.