Monitor your Website for Online Availability

Article Index - Website Monitoring - Monitor your Website for Online Availability

Author: Steve Dawson

Is your website accessible?
Can your customers access your website?
How many times is my website down without my notification?
Does my web host really have 99% uptime?

These are just a few of the many questions which can cause an e-commerce site a few problems without the website owner knowing. Downtime on websites is becoming a far more widespread problem for site owners that ever before. Coupled with the increasing amount of e-commerce shopping websites, how do you know your customers have not already visited your website and moved on because of a website unavailability problem?

Using a website monitoring service to ensure that your site is available 24hrs a day 7 days a week can save you much headache as well as increasing your chances of a sale.

It is vitally important that your web site is in full working order at all times. Potential customers who cannot view your product/services or gain access to information because of errors or faults will quickly go elsewhere taking with them a bad impression of your Company. Losing a potential customer is bad enough but for them to leave with a poor impression of your Company is even worse.

So why do you need a Website Monitoring service?
Basically you need to know when your website is available and when it is not. By monitoring the situation you will have a clear picture of how your customers view your website. You need to know how long it takes your Web server to respond to requests and also be informed when major errors are encountered, such as pages not found, servers not responding, or Internet routing errors. Being notified that your site is unavailable to your customers - as seen from the Internet - allows you to begin troubleshooting before your irate customers call you.

A site that is frequently inaccessible is likely to lose you business and customers. A web server and web site which is easily accessible and responsive can only increase business for your Company. This is where website monitoring informs you where your server or web site problems lie.

Why Monitor a website for availability?
You may say that your web site has been designed by professionals and will not be subject to problems. There are many companies and some very big corporations who would have agreed with you until the problem hit them, now they know to their cost how damaging it can be not to have your web at 100% performance.

Many Companies are now using website monitoring to monitor their web sites. If you too are serious about your web presence then you need to look after your web site and, rest assured, if anything untoward goes wrong with your web site you'll be the first to know and not a disgruntled visitor.

So what kind of errors can happen to website?
There are quite a number of things that cause web sites to have errors, some are listed below

 Web Server Failure
 Faulty or inadequate programming code
 Malicious attacks and hackers
 Unexpected user requests
 Viruses
 Navigation Errors

These are just a few of the causes that can stop your web site from functioning correctly.

People often check out a firm or Company's web site before making a decision to buy. It is therefore very important that a website is functioning correctly and the potential customer is not left with a bad impression of a business because of a fault. Even a minor error on a website could be damaging. Why spend time and money having a web site designed only to find out that your web site has been 'down' and unavailable.

If you don't check your site frequently, how do you find out if everything is working as it should be? If you are busy, the temptation is to assume that all will be OK. After all, you've probably paid a professional website designer to do your Company's site, so you might be forgiven for thinking nothing can go wrong. Unfortunately this is not the case. Websites need maintaining to keep them operating as intended. Things do go wrong and most probably will, just when you are least expecting it and you can't blame the website designer in this case!

You are probably saying, "visitors can't expect a web site to be operational 100% of the time", and that's probably true. There are options to guard against websites that are unavailable for whatever reason. One way is to have a back-up site on another server and if your main site is down then visitors are redirected to your back-up site. However, this option is expensive. The best way of protecting your investment and customers and visitors is to have your website up and running and working correctly. The way to do this is by knowing immediately if your website has a problem so the matter can be speedily dealt with.

Monitoring your website and checking website availability is now a must service for any business or company which is selling products online. So which one do I recommend or use?

I can't decide which one is best for your business, but the one I use Website Availability has a free trial available. With that you can't go far wrong!

LINK: Website Availability - 2 Week Free Trial

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