Website Monitoring Services: 5 Tips on Choosing a Provider

Your website is your face to the world. If it goes down, or malfunctions, your prospects will just go to the next site in the search results. So you know you need to monitor it, but how do you go about choosing a monitoring service?

Here are five tips for choosing a website monitoring service:

1. Global monitoring sites – Your website can be accessed from anywhere in the world. And there’s a lot of internet between where your website is hosted, and every one of your visitors. To understand whether or not all those visitors can find and use your website, be sure to pick a monitoring service that checks your site from different spots around the country and the world.

2. Ease of use – There are different approaches to monitoring. Some include installation of hardware and/or software into your hosting environment, adding an additional burden onto your IT staff to integrate and maintain. Other services require no hardware or software but instead run on the service’s own servers using configuration files to check your website. While there may be situations where local hardware may be required, most businesses can easily set up and use a service that provides everything you need without installing software or hardware to your local IT environment.

3. Escalation – Getting notified when your site goes down is critical. A good website monitoring service will allow you to establish an escalation plan so that if the first level responders don’t get the message, there is a procedure to continue up the chain until someone responds. This prevents any one person from becoming the single point of failure for your website.

4. Testing freuency – Some website features or functions may be more critical than others. Or you may have more than one website. Being able to set a minimal time between checks to ensure critical functions are working is a key feature that will help you recognize any failures as soon as they occur. Less critical functions can be checked less often. Testing frequencies between 1-60 minutes should be included in whatever service you choose.

5. Customer service – When you are relying on a company to monitor your website you need to know they are there to help you when you need it. If you’re getting false alarms, or the notifications weren’t sent, the company needs to resolve the issues immediately – or their monitoring really isn’t helping you at all. Be sure to check testimonials and their track record before making a decision.

At Alertra we strive to offer the best website monitoring services, with excellent customer service, at reasonable prices. Give us a call today, or sign-up here for our free trial.