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One would think that as the Internet grows out of its infancy and new technologies are being deployed, website downtime would have become a thing of the past. The truth is that website outages are still a common occurrence. In fact, an increasing number of sites seem to go "dark" lately, with various reasons for the site outages. The outages themselves, however, are not the only problem. How companies respond to the outages and how quickly they are resolved have a direct impact on how the public perceives the site's reliability and professionalism. Are You the Last to Know When Your Site Goes Down? If you don't want website downtime to have a bigger impact than necessary on your site's profits or its reputation, you need to make sure that you are never the last to know when your site goes down. This means investing in quality website monitoring service. The sooner you find out about an outage, the sooner you can get to work troubleshooting, fixing, and addressing the damage that the outage may have caused to your business's reputation. Chances are that you don't have an army of IT employees to throw at problems like website downtime. This means that you need to outsource some of the tasks associated with monitoring your site to a quality and reliable website monitoring service. When you utilize such a service, you will be notified via email, phone, or SMS text message the moment your site goes down. Once you know how crucial a website monitoring service is to your site's success, the question turns to what should you look for when choosing a quality website monitoring service provider. Not All Website Monitoring Services are Created Equal When you decide to implement website monitoring service as a part of your site's plan for success, you need to understand that not all services are created equal. There are indeed some "free" services offered on the Web. In this day and age, however, you tend to get what you pay for and "free" is never actually the best. Rather than shopping based on price alone, there are certain features you should look for. Monitoring Intervals First, check to see how often the service actually monitors your site. While some services will check your site every 30 minutes or so, others will check your site as frequently as you want them to (sometimes as often as every minute). When every minute counts and every minute of downtime equates to money lost, the interval of the monitoring becomes increasingly important. The Number and Location of Servers If a website monitoring service only has one server monitoring your site or multiple servers in just one location, what happens during a power outage? How will your site remain protected if something happens to the facility? Because of this, you want to ensure that you utilize a website monitoring service that utilizes multiple services across the globe. This will ensure that if one server goes down, the others will not be affected and your site will receive continuous monitoring coverage. The Method of Alert Some website monitoring services only notify you via email if your site goes down. If your email goes down with your site, this isn't going to do you a bit of good. You want to select a website monitor that alerts you via phone and SMS text message in addition to email. This way you know that you'll be the first to know when your site goes down, even if your email goes down with it. Time is of the Essence When it comes to fixing issues associated with website downtime, time is of the essence. You need to be the first to know when downtime occurs, not the last. If you want to make sure you know about downtime before your site's customers even know it's happening, you need to invest in a quality website monitoring service. Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitor the availability and performance of Internet-connected devices. As part of Alertra website monitoring service, we provide timely alert notifications and access to detailed reporting. We offer monitoring service to all sizes of businesses right from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
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website downtime, website monitoring, site uptime,
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