What to Expect from Website Monitoring Services?

By | August 17, 2012

Inappropriate performance or downtime of your website can cost your business a lot because the end-users who want to visit your website will move to your competitors’ website because they get frustrated whenever a web-page is not available. However, downtime can be dealt with web monitoring services and these services are quite essential for any business today to deal with such situations effectively.

When it comes to choosing a web monitoring service, there are number of options are available. If you make any mistake in choosing the services, then you will put your business reputation in a stake.

Role of web monitoring services: Website availability and functionality is affected when there is a poor server performance and downtime in the website. This is because, heavy traffic and malicious attacks blocks the server and make the website unavailable. An effective website monitoring service takes care of all these problems by keeping a check on every aspect that affects the performance and accessibility of website. Whenever it detects an error in a server or a website, it immediately alerts the website owner for instant rectification of the problem.

Key factors to consider while hiring a website monitoring service: Each monitoring company provides its own package of features. Of those, you have to choose the service according to your business needs.

  • First and the foremost is you have to decide what should be monitored?: Basic thing is it should monitor the server. In order to know the status and the website performance, it should check the HTTP/HTTPS web servers.
  • Even monitoring protocols or email servers like SMTP, IMAP and POP3 should also be checked because email is the crucial communication tool used by businesses in these days. Delayed or non-delivery of the email can impact business operations severely.
  • PNG, DNS look up is also crucial to ensure availability of your website and applications.
  • Your website should be monitored from multiple locations, if your website is for global audience.
  • Frequency of monitoring your website means that you can choose or set some time intervals and check your website quite frequently in that time intervals.
  • Real-time updates and customized alerts: If any error occurs in the performance of the website, this service will alert the website administrator. So, you can also receive real-time updates of the performance of servers. These kinds of alerts will help you to rectify the problem instantly.
  • Frequent generating of reports: Apart from monitoring the performance of the servers or websites, it should also note the up-time and downtime patterns of the websites. This report will help the owner to check the pattern and control the latency of the server and other applications.
  • The service should also deal with false alerts.

These are some of the features you have to consider when choosing the web monitoring services and don’t forget that the company which is providing these services should be reliable and reputed company.