Why Use a Third Party Service for Monitoring Uptime?

Uptime monitoring of websites and servers is crucial in minimizing website downtimes. When website is experiencing frequent downtime and performance issues, monitoring site uptime statistics will help to analyze the metrics that are causing site downtime. Now-a-days, it is becoming increasingly common that online businesses are partnering with third party website monitoring service to get a correct picture of their site uptime numbers. However, some of the site owners are still hesitant as they do not understand why they have to partner with third party service for uptime monitoring while they have hosting provider to take care of the issue.

Not All Web Hosting Providers Offer Equal Service

Though it is the responsibility of web hosting service to monitor uptime and keep a check on site's functionality, many of the hosting providers may only provide limited parameter monitoring. Typically, higher uptime rates are just selling points for some hosting providers. Even an uptime rate as high as 98% may not be viable if you are expecting consistent accessibility to your website. A small percentage in uptime variation such as 0.1% can make a huge difference in downtime hours. For instance, a service offering 99.7% and 99.8% may seems very close in numbers, but there is a significant difference in downtime hours. Just imagine a downtime during peak business hours for a seasonal business. Worse, imagine the hosting provider providing a low quality monitoring service that doesn't timely report a downtime on the functionality of a site. Just imagine the headaches caused by false reports of downtime during extended working hours of peak season. For all these reasons the website monitoring service from a web hosting company has many limitations. 

Uptime Excludes Performance Issues

Just because the site is up and running, doesn't mean that the site has better performance. While calculating website uptime, hosting providers consider the time your site is being live on the web, but ignore performance issues which are as frustrating as outages. For instance, some server issues may not completely bring down the site but affect the site response and page loading time. Though the site is not performing, it is counted as uptime by hosting service because their interpretation of website uptime is different. Here, the uptime is calculated based on the site accessibility, but in reality the website is deprived of performance to serve the customer needs. Hence, it is important to have a monitoring system that performs holistic checks on site uptime including the measures of performance.

Server Upgrades and Maintenance Hours are not Counted

Another important aspect is, the site uptime that you are offered by the hosting service includes only unplanned outages but do not count server upgrades and maintenance shutdowns. For instance, if the site experiences 15 hours of unplanned downtime per month, and if 15 hours is scheduled for planned downtime, then the downtime average per day will be approximately one hour. In addition to that, if maintenance is not planned properly and any technical or hardware issue comes up, the site will go down for extended hours until the issue gets resolved. So, it is essential to have an uptime monitoring system that actively monitors planned and unplanned downtime events and brings it to the notice of site owners if there are any areas of concern.

Why Third Party Validation of Uptime is Important?

The uptime reports provided by the hosting providers may not be the actual percentage uptime that your site is practically experiencing. The real question is whether the hosting service is delivering consistent level of uptime numbers that they are accountable for. Only an external website monitoring service can validate the services of a hosting provider and objectively identify if there is a need to upgrade or change your existing hosting plan. With the help of monitoring service, it easy to crosscheck the real site uptime numbers and the percentage uptime promised by the hosting service. This will help the site owners to decide whether to continue with the existing provider or move to another hosting service.