So your website is up and running
What next?
It is wrong to think that your work is done the moment your website is live, because the reality is that it’s just beginning.
If you want to maximize the full potential of your website, you need to monitor it constantly. Instead of relying solely on web hosting services and features.
The importance of website monitoring can’t be emphasized enough :
- Search engines like Google can use your websites uptime for search ranking purposes
- Protecting the image of your business
- Prevent loss of sales through being down
- Can alert you immediately to hacker attacks
Most importantly, it helps maintain uptime.
What is uptime?
This is the measure of time that your website is working as it should be and available to the users.
Its primary purpose is to determine how reliable or stable your website is, especially when left unattended for an extended period of time.
Extremely long uptime, however, is considered negligence, because reboots are required for regular software updates.
Given the information above, it is clear how important it is to maintain optimum uptime. Well, with the right website monitoring tool, your website will only experience downtimes during reboot for administrative or maintenance purposes.
How can a website monitoring tool maintain uptime?
Imagine yourself trying to get work done with the use of a particular website or application.If you can’t rely on its availability because of major website downtimes, you would feel frustrated and may stop using the website or application entirely.
If you were the owner of the unreliable website and you are unaware that it is not available at all times, you are losing business and sales without you even knowing it.
Worse yet, your website could be penalized by Google for providing a poor service to your users.
This is why you should integrate a website monitoring tool into your web server. Website hosting can only do so much, and it is your responsibility to keep an eye on the performance and availability of your site.
What website monitoring tools can you integrate with server hosting?
Uptime Robot is a free application that has proven useful for the web community. It checks for downtimes every 5 minutes, and then sends a notification when it happens through emails.
Site24x7 is a SaaS product that is recognized as the most flexible monitoring tool that web developers and IT personnel use. It comes with a wide range of features and functionality, including website monitoring that tests the availability of a website. It is also combined with monitoring tool for server hosting and applications, which instantly notifies you of any problems and tracks performance.
The application allows you to monitor the status of your website with no limit as to the number of websites that you want tracked. If there are any issues with the web server and other elements of your website, you will receive an email notification or text alert.
These are just some examples of website monitoring tools that you can use to track uptime. To help you choose the best one, it is important to understand the different monitor types.
- HTTP(S) is highly recommended for website monitoring
- PING is best used for monitoring a web server
- PORT is useful in monitoring different services such as DNS, POP and SMTP.