What is a Website Monitor?

In a perfect world our websites would never experience any downtime. Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world. If you own a website, it will inevitably go down at some point in time. The reasons will vary, but the effect will be the same. Your site will be unavailable and your customers will be frustrated. If you want to stay on top of your website downtime, you need a quality website monitor.

What is a Website Monitor?

A website monitor is a service that monitors the uptime of your website. While you can’t sit in front of your computer hitting the refresh button 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, website monitoring services have automated programs in place to do this for you. If your website suddenly goes down, your website monitor will notify you and let you know about the problem.

What are the Benefits of a Website Monitor?

If your site goes down, your visitors are going to expect you to go to work immediately to get it back up and running. The problem is that if you don’t know about the outage, there is nothing you can do about it. That is where website monitoring services come into play. By utilizing a website monitor, you can receive notifications the moment your site suffers an outage, letting you go to work to fix the problem sooner rather than later.

How do Website Monitors Work?

When you sign up for a website monitoring service, the service uses servers to monitor the status of your website at designated intervals (as often as every 60 seconds). These servers run protocol tests on your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While you’re in bed sleeping, the website monitor is at work to ensure that your site stays up and running. If the monitoring service detects a connection failure or an issue with your site’s performance, the service will contact you immediately. The method of contact will vary depending on the type of website monitoring service you use. A quality website monitoring service will also provide you with reports, logging the downtime of your website each month. These reports can help you pinpoint issues that may be contributing to your downtime, such as spikes in website traffic.

How Much Do Website Monitoring Services Cost?

The costs of website monitoring services vary from one service to the next. While there are some “free” website monitors available, their functions are limited, as are their methods of contact. Most services will charge a base fee to monitor your website and then charge you a fee for each alert you receive when your site goes down. For example, Alertra charges $10 per month, allowing you to monitor up to 50 URLs. If you want to receive a phone call each time your site suffers an outage, you’re charged less than 30 cents for each call you receive. Since the method of notification is important when your site goes down, it’s best to pay for SMS or phone notifications in case your email server is down along with your site. Since every minute of downtime can mean lost profits for your site, a 30 cent phone call is well worth the investment.

Don’t Leave Your Site’s Performance Up to Chance

The bottom line is that you don’t really know how well your site is performing or how much downtime you are experiencing unless you have quality website monitoring in place. Since downtime equates to lost profits and frustrated customers who may go elsewhere for their needs, make sure you have a quality website monitor in place to notify you when your site goes down. When you know that your site is suffering an outage, you can get to work immediately, putting your contingency plans into place to get your site back up for customers to access and to allow business to resume as usual.