Some Of The Uptime Metrics Of a Website

When companies rely on websites for their business, then downtime is not acceptable. Needless to say, every time websites go down or do not perform well with issues, businesses lose their traffic and revenues. When it comes to measuring website uptime, web hosts merely consider the time your site is being alive on the web, but ignore performance issues. The uptime measurements from site owner's point of view is quite different because for them uptime measure also includes site response issues, slow page loads and part of the site not working properly.

Site Is Down

In case of both planned and unplanned outages, the site goes down completely without being available to the the users for browsing. When downtime is required for maintenance, providers plan during off peak hours so that it impacts less on their customer's businesses. But in unplanned outages, the site owners will not even have the chance to display error messages for their customers. The site suddenly stops working from being active to the users until the issue is identified and resolved by the hosting provider. In both the above cases, there is still a chance that user might come back and make few more attempts to your website. 

Site Is Up But Suffers With Performance Issues

As already mentioned above, hosting provider counts it as uptime if the site is live on the web, irrespective of the performance issues. It is quite natural that hosting services focus more on the uptime numbers to tout about their service but are less likely concerned about the needs of your business. If the site is profit driven then your business will be at loss because of its poor performance. Most of the users will have less patience to wait long for the website to load if it is suffering with speed issues. The users would rather prefer to navigate to other websites that are quick and well performing, than waste their time with slow & lousy sites. It will create a bad impression among customers and your reputation may also go for a toss, making your business lose out in the competition.

Portions of The Website Not Working

This situation is more uncomfortable than downtime and performance issues because you will not realize the problem unless you are informed by others. Since the site is accessible to the users, you will be under the impression that the site is up & functioning normally. The hosting provider might not even know about it because they will be focusing more on the site availability rather than its working. Consider a  scenario that you have invested some amount on digital marketing to boost your website and improve rankings in search engines. Your site might be ranking well in SERPs but may not be productive because customers may not have access to some critical portions of your website. After one or two attempts, the customers get annoyed and do not even click on your website link even if they see it in the first few positions of the search results. 

How To Check Website Status?

While monitoring the website manually is one method for tracking uptime, using monitoring service is another alternative for identifying the downtime & performance issues. It is impractical to manually go through each component and check website status for continuous availability. Having monitoring services will simplify the process because they track website uptime & performance conveniently, regularly and continuously.