In this era, all businesses need websites since consumers are increasingly looking for goods and services on the web. Your business website can be compared to your online brick and mortar store where customers come over when they need anything. Imagine a situation where clients come to your physical store and find that you are closed or not available. This is undesirable for any firm, and you should always be there when your clients come knocking. How do you ensure that your website is always up and running? The best way of doing it is by getting a reliable uptime monitoring service that will monitor website changes and inform you when it is down so that you can act within the shortest time possible and get it back up.
If you search the web for an uptime monitoring service, you will get a plethora of options and they might be overwhelming for you when you try to pick the best one. Doing it should not be a hard thing for you if you know what to look out for. Read below and check out some useful tips for selecting the best uptime monitoring service for you.
Analyze Your Needs
When choosing an uptime monitoring service, you will usually be required to choose between the active and passive monitoring services. The active ones are suitable for businesses whose websites are profit-oriented such as those owned by online retailers, and there are more serious concerns on why the site should be up. The passive monitoring services are suitable for sites that are not really profit driven and where customers mainly go to the website for basic information and other things. Before you select, it is good to assess what your business needs are and make a choice based on your determination. It is evident that the passive monitoring will naturally be less costly than the active one and you should not invest too much in these services if it is not necessary. In a nutshell, have a clear idea of what you expect from an uptime monitoring service before looking for one so that you do not land on something that is irrelevant to you.
Experience
Due to the increased demand for uptime monitoring services, it is evident that you will come across services that are less than a year old. Keep in mind that while some of these new entries might be good, it is safe to lean towards the experienced monitors. Uptime monitoring is a sensitive thing and you should entrust it to a form that has been around for some time. This experience is crucial since it gives one more knowledge on the loading times and other things that can help to improve your website’s performance and reduce its downtime. Services that have been around for more than ten years are the best since they have performed several checks and you have somewhere to go and find out if their services are up to the required standards or not.
Location Of The Servers
It is essential to know where the servers of the website monitoring services are located. It is not advisable to go for a service whose servers are located in one location due to several reasons. Having a single server in one place is like putting all your eggs in one basket. What will happen if there is a power interruption in that area? What happens if there is an error with that server? An excellent service should have multiple servers located in various locations so that you are assured that your website is monitored even if one of the servers blows up or stops working due to some reason. Your site should not left be unmonitored if you have paid for the services as a couple of hours could translate in massive losses for firms that deal with a lot of traffic and visitors.
Communication Methods
You should always find out how the firm in question will communicate the server downtime if it happens. This is essential since it determines the amount of time that your site will be down. Typically, the primary forms of communications that the services have are through email, text or calls. Taking a situation where your site goes down in the middle of the night, receiving an email might be undesirable since you might not listen to the alert while sleeping. You will, therefore, wake up the following morning and check out the notification before acting, something that implies that your site may be down for a couple of hours. A reliable service should communicate any case of downtime through text and phone calls so that you do not waste any time and act promptly to rectify the problem.
Frequency Of The Checks
Understanding how often your site will be checked is the other thing to look at when determining the best services. The service usually pings your site and waits for a response before deciding whether it is running normally or not. Every single minute of downtime counts, and it can translate to massive losses for companies such as the online retailers. A service that pings your site every fifteen minutes is undesirable since your site may be down for the entire time before it discovers it. A reliable service should be checking for downtime every minute so that your site does not go down for more than a minute before you are informed.
Lastly, it is vital to look into the payment terms stated by the service. You may have an active website in place being hosted by a reliable platform and expect that the instances of downtime should be far-fetched every month. In such a situation, it might be undesirable to pay a flat fee for your service since you will be investing money and not receiving the value for it. It is best to choose a service that offers you a flexible payment plan where you are required to pay a small fee and an additional one for every instance that your site is down.
Deciding on performance monitoring services that is ideal for you should be done after taking all the considerations carefully. Remember that the best service should offer you reliable monitoring services while still provide you value for your money.
