06/30/2014

Website Monitoring Service: Don't Be the Last to Know When Your Site Goes Down

Every minute your site is down is a minute of potential profit that is lost. Contrary to what some may believe, advances in technology do not mean a reduction in website downtime. In fact, even the biggest of sites go down, including giants like Amazon. The outages are not the only problem that downtime brings to light, however. The public looks to see how quickly downtime is resolved when a site goes down. How fast the downtime is addressed and the measures taken to keep the public informed of the downtime also have a significant impact on a company's reputation.

How Soon Do You Know When Your Site Goes Down?

How long does it take you to discover when your site is experiencing an outage? If you don't have website monitoring in place, chances are that it takes you a minimum of an hour to find out. Maybe even more. Can you really afford to lose an hour's worth of potential profits? Can you afford an hour of your customers not being able to access your site and not knowing why your site is down or if you even know about it? To make matters worse, if your email goes down with your site and your customers try contacting you regarding the outage, you're not going to see those emails until your site is back up and running. That means you don't even know of the issue until you notice it on your own or the issue has been resolved.

Be the First to Know

When it comes to website downtime, time is of the essence. A quality website monitor will ensure that time is on your side. You will know the moment your site goes down. Without a quality website monitor in place, you have no idea when you will discover a website outage. It could be hours, even days, before you realize your site isn't up and running.

How to Put Quality Website Monitoring into Place

Once you realize how crucial website monitoring is to the success of your business, there are a few things you are going to want to consider before putting such a service into place.

First, realize that not all website monitoring services are created equal. You need one that utilizes a number of methods of contact when your site experiences an outage or performance issue, not just email. Quality website monitoring companies will utilize SMS text messages and phone calls in addition to email. This ensures that even if your email goes down, you're still aware of the site's outage.

Also make sure that you choose a website monitoring service that has multiple servers in multiple locations. This way, if a server or even an entire server location goes down, there are other servers in place that can pick up the slack.

Once you find a quality website monitoring service to suit your needs, put its services into place sooner rather than later. Procrastination is a common tendency. This is not one of the things you want to procrastinate. You need your site's uptime to be protected now, not after an outage has already done damage to your site's profits and reputation.