What is a Website Monitoring Service

The Internet has changed the world as we know it. The business world is controlled by the World Wide Web. Websites can make or break the reputation of a company. While there are many factors that contribute to the success of a website, the availability and performance of the site are just as important as the design and the content.

Is Website Downtime Affecting Your Reputation?

The reputation of your website has a direct impact on the reputation of your business. If your website experiences significant outages or slowdowns as a result of server downtime, your customers are going to be frustrated and you’re going to start to see a drop in your profits. While many hosting companies promise an uptime of 99.9 percent, actually fulfilling such a promise is another story. The uptime of a website depends on a number of factors and some of these factors are beyond the control of the hosting company.

Nothing can be worse for your business than to have people arrive at your URL hoping to purchase your products or services and being unable to do so. A website that isn’t operating speaks volumes about how a business is run. Website downtime can result in your website visitors wondering whether or not your company can actually provide them with the level of service they require. The question is, how do you know if website downtime is a problem for your company?

Assessing Your Website’s Downtime and Performance

The only way to know for sure just how your hosting servers are impacting your company’s image is to subscribe to a website monitoring service. A website monitoring service will regularly check your website and servers and will let you know immediately if a problem is occurring. When you are notified of problems, the frequency of the notifications will let you know if you need to take measures to address the issues your website is experiencing.

Web monitoring services can vary from one company to the next. Different services offer different packages. Some services may only monitor the website itself. Other services can monitor your website, your email servers, your routers, your DNS and your web servers. A good monitoring service will not only evaluate website downtime or server outages; the service will also monitor the performance of your site. If you don’t want your customers leaving your site due to frustration caused by delays in loading your website’s pages, you need to know if your site is suffering performance issues. The more comprehensive a website monitoring service is, the more accurate of a picture you will get when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of your website hosting.

It’s important to remember that when you run a business online, that business must be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Customers expect nothing less. It’s nearly impossible to monitor the consistent availability of your website yourself, let alone its performance. This is why website monitoring services have risen to the challenge, providing website owners with the services they need to ensure that their servers are working effectively and that their businesses are not losing profits or suffering a damaged reputation.