Website Monitoring Services

If your website is up, your website search rankings are important. However, what about when your website is down and having problems? Obviously, they are not as important. Having a website monitoring service will help keep your website functional and operating so that the search rankings continue to mean something. Nevertheless, things like hardware failures, software lockups, viruses; hackers, databases, and Internet connectivity are important in your online success. Website monitoring serves one main purpose: to notify you when things go wrong.

Website monitoring services checks the site at intervals, and if it cannot log in for some reason or encounters a problem and alerts the administrator immediately. The administrator can then log into the website administration panel and fix the problem. Some services use a ping to check the site, and if the packet is returned undeliverable, then it will try again. If it is still returned undeliverable, the administrator is contacted. However, with a ping, all it does is verify that the site has power, not that it is functioning properly. Many website monitoring services provide a detailed report. This report is helpful in determining whether the site is still functional. The intervals depend on the package the user has purchased and can range anywhere from every two minutes to every sixty minutes. This service is generally used by e-commerce sites and is quite expensive, ranging from $30 to $99 per month.

When a website monitoring service checks a site, it can return a report that will tell you exactly what needs repair. Additional software may be required. They check connections and provide web server response codes and messages. If the server fails to connect, the service sends a message to the administrator. A firewall rule will need to be created if your monitoring service needs to access a site that is protected behind a firewall.

Monitoring your website is great for customer relations. Keeping existing customers is ideal, while gaining new ones is always great. Some monitoring services can help you keep existing customers by ensuring that your website is functioning. It can also help you gain new ones the same way. Rather than having your customer alert your ISP that the website is down, they may not even notice that it is down if you were to use an external monitoring service. The service can alert to you any problems so that they may be fixed, hopefully before the customer even notices that there is a problem.

Internet access customers usually enter into a service level agreement (SLA) with corporate hosting clients as the customers usually expect a certain level of service. Unfortunately, SLA's impose fines on clients that do not meet requirements. A website monitoring service can deter disputes by measuring and recording the levels of usage. The client and the host can review the reports and terms can be based on the levels recorded in the reports.

There are a few "rules" to website monitoring. Firstly, never monitor someone else's domain. It is the biggest problem among website monitoring companies. Any down time will get charged to your domain. Monitor only your own sites.

Secondly, never ignore alerts. They were sent to you for a reason. There is a problem and you need to fix it. Whether it is fixing a link or repairing something more important, there is something in need of repair. Your entire site might be down. The alerts tell you what is wrong so that you can fix it. If your website is down, you are losing sales. Every ten minutes your site is down takes off a percentage of your uptime. Being up 99.9% or 100% of the time is the ideal and is attainable.

Thirdly, use the "check all" feature. Once you have repaired your site, your next task is to inform your website monitoring service that your site is back up. This is so that they can resume monitoring it. If you do not, your downtime keeps going up (and your percentage keeps going down!) If there is an outage, you can use the check all feature. This makes sure that everything is repaired correctly and tests the server.

Fourthly, make your DNS changes carefully because of the TTLs of DNS entries. When you set up a DNS entry, you also set up a TTL. This permits internet browsers and other services to cache the mapping between the IP and your domain so that it does not have to ask for it each time the user visits your site. This speeds up the users experience and drops the load on your domain servers. So make your DNS changes carefully to prevent outages.