Confirm Your Site’s Availability with a Site Monitoring Service

You’ve invested time, money and numerous other resources to ensure your website is profitable. Have you taken all the necessary steps to protect your investment? Websites can suddenly lose performance or become unavailable when you least expect it. Each moment of downtime hurts your business’ reputation as well as the bottom line. Resolving issues in a timely matter is critical. But how can you address issues if you don’t know they exist?

Without instant notifications of issues, your website’s problems can persist until a disgruntled user notifies you or until you notice the issue yourself. Since you probably aren’t checking your website once an hour, there’s a good chance that your website will demonstrate poor performance for hours or even days. To prevent this scenario you should consider a web monitoring service.

Web monitoring services ensure your site is working correctly and provide notifications should anything fail. There are a wide range of services available. Each offers various monitoring options and costs to fit your specific needs. Some key features to consider include:

Frequency of Monitoring
Do you need a service that checks your site once a day, once an hour or something that provides real time monitoring 24/7? Obviously, the more frequent the monitoring, the greater the investment.

Issues Monitored
Not all services cover the same types of issues.

Site Failure
Nearly all services monitor the total availability of your site.  This means you will receive notification only if the entire site fails. There are several free services that offer this feature, so this may be a good place to start if you have no budget and only need minimal monitoring.

Inaccessible Pages
Sometimes your home page may be available while select pages within your site fail to load.  This feature will alert you when any single page is affected.

Slow Response Time
A site that performs slowly can be as catastrophic to business as a site that doesn’t load at all. More advanced services can alert you if your performance falls below certain thresholds.

Form/Shopping Cart Errors
Some services can monitor your forms, shopping cart and other data collection elements to ensure no errors occur. Completing orders is critical but issues with this process can be difficult to catch.

Methods of Receiving Alerts
Your notifications will be useless if you can’t receive them in an effective manner. Do you need to receive you notifications via email, pager, SMS or cell phone? The number of individuals contacted will also vary per service. Should your technical team be automatically contacted as well? More advanced services offer issue escalation, contacting more individuals as issues persist.

Reporting
Advanced monitoring services offer reporting features. If you need to see history and trending you will need this ability.