So, Your Hosting Provider Offers Uptime Statistics? Why You Still Need a Quality Website Monitoring Service.

Literally anyone who owns or operates a website has come to understand the importance of maximizing uptime and keeping track of your website’s downtime and performance. However, as almost all hosting services are now including uptime statistics in their plans, some people have fallen to believe that the need for partnership with a quality website downtime monitoring service is no longer a necessity. This faulty logic couldn’t be further from the truth, however. In this post we will discuss how, even in the face of hosting providers that offer customers uptime stats, partnering with a quality website monitoring service is more important than ever.

Reported Outage Times Don’t Always Reflect Reality

When it comes to the outage reports that you receive from your hosting provider, it’s important to understand that the statistics you are given in those reports don’t always reflect the actual level of service you’re getting in terms of uptime consistency. This is especially true with cloud hosting services, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. The reports given by hosting providers usually offer very little detail, are not provided in real time, and can obscure actual downtime statistics to reflect what the company wants you to see.

Is It in a Provider’s Best Interests to Self-Report?

The first problem this type of reporting presents is that when you depend on your hosting provider to provide you with accurate website downtime information, it’s not really in that provider’s best interest to be completely transparent or to make it clear exactly how many hours your website was down for due to hosting issues. Without a quality website monitoring plan in place, you have no idea if the numbers you’re being provided with even come close to reflecting the actual downtime your site experienced. For example, because accurate downtime numbers may not be favorable to a hosting provider, that provider might use the least amount of regional information or other ways of computing downtime in their reports to skew the numbers in their favor.

Lack of Service and Detail

The second problem is that no hosting provider offers nearly instantaneous notification of website downtime. It has become clearly evident over the years how crucial it is that you find out about website downtime and performance issues the moment they begin. Website hosting services don’t offer real-time reporting. Only a quality website monitoring provider will alert you the moment your website’s downtime begins and prevent downtime by alerting you of performance issues that may be a sign your site is about to go down.

Not All Websites Are the Same

The third problem is that the statistics provided by your hosting provider only shed light on problems that are occurring with your hosting provider overall. If a downtime incident is isolated to an issue with your website itself, the reports you are given by your hosting provider won’t be of any help to you. A quality website monitoring service, however, can alert you of any and all problems related to your website’s uptime, making you aware of downtime in real-time and even alert you as to site performance issues.

The Big Picture

Last, but not least, are running totals. Some hosting providers only offer a 90-day running total of downtime statistics, whereas others may be willing to paint a more accurate picture with a 12-month running total. It makes it very hard to compare the service you’re paying for to the service you’re getting and make apples-to-apples comparisons when choosing the hosting provider that will offer you the most consistent and reliable service.

Why Quality Website Monitoring is Still a Necessity

If you really want the full picture when it comes to your website’s uptime performance, you can’t simply rely on your hosting provider to offer that information in a completely transparent manner. After all, if a hosting service is providing sub-par service in terms of uptime, the company doesn’t really have much incentive to shed light on that fact. The only way to get accurate numbers, and to get notifications in a manner that allows you to address downtime the moment it happens, you need to partner with an independent, high-quality, third-party website monitoring service. Think of these providers as not only a partner that helps you maximize your website’s uptime, but one that provides you with an accurate picture in terms of your site’s uptime performance and any potential issues with downtime trends. Only then can you be assured that you are actually minimizing your website’s downtime as much as possible while ensuring that you have a good grasp on the downtime that your hosting provider may be causing.