Specific Reasons Why Websites Should Employ External Website Monitoring Service

Now-a-days websites have become one of the essential ways for doing business. With most companies doing business online, there is a rapid increase in the number of websites in the past few years. It is very common that online businesses have to differentiate themselves in the competition by providing better user experience. For this, they need to have their websites performing well for the users. This makes external website monitoring an important process in keeping the sites working in good condition and delivering a good user experience.

A comprehensive website monitoring service monitors website availability as well as tracks various website aspects such as uptime & response time, hosting needs, and other critical network or server issues that influence the site performance. Apart from these benefits, there are other specific reasons why websites should employ an external website monitoring service.

Better reliability when compared to free tools as well as manual & internal monitoring methods

If you are a website owner, it is not feasible to spend your productive time in tracking each component of the website manually for performance and functionality checking from local area network. Neither, you can rely on free tools for real-time tracking because they have low quality features and less ability to track websites for comprehensive set of parameters. On top of it, to test your website internally for various situations, sometimes you may need to deploy more than one free testing tool. The tools might generate adhoc reports which might not give the accurate data on site uptime and performance. But this is not the case with external site monitoring service. It provides superior features to track various key parameters that indicate performance deterioration of websites. By using this comprehensive data, you can better analyze the problems and quickly address the challenges before they ever grow into complex downtime issues.

Continuous website monitoring enables quality site experience

As a website owner, ensuring the continuity of website's monitoring coverage is important for you because you don't want to be casual about your website user experience for an e-commerce site. If you are running an online e-commerce website, then every second of downtime can result in loss of potential customers, sales, revenues and more importantly the brand reputation. With external monitoring service, the site is being watched for downtime by multiple servers placed across different locations. That means your site will be surveyed consistently for various parameters that determine the uptime and performance.

Keeps a tab on hosting service

It is not a wise idea to rely entirely on the uptime reports delivered by the hosting provider. The hosting providers focus only on the server uptime but do not worry about the site functionality or performance. If the server is up, it is considered as uptime by hosting service, irrespective of the site performance for the end users. External website monitoring not only keeps a check on hosting providers but also helps to objectively identify if there is a necessity to upgrade your existing hosting plan. It tells you if your site is actually receiving the uptime rate promised by the hosting service, based on which you can decide whether to continue or change the hosting company to a better service.

Understand the bottlenecks that are hurting your site's performance

Think about the situation that your site suddenly becomes viral, gets high traffic influx and goes offline because of significant load increase on web server. You will have no clue on such downtime situations until the website is actually down for the users. Or perhaps, the site is up for user activity but suffers with performance issue in some portions of the website. Such situations are preventable if there is a system that can predict the possible issues. External website monitoring is one such efficient service that not only monitors the availability of website but predicts and alerts the possible issues, so that you can start resolving the issue and reduce downtime duration.

Minimizes downtime and its consequences

Not every website monitoring tool can provide the same level of service for websites. There are many free tools that can ping your website to check its availability. But very few of them can take the responsibility of intimating the downtime message to the site owners by sending alerts through various means. External monitoring service helps you to address the downtime challenges smoothly and also minimizes the amount of downtime that your website encounters. The sooner you get alerted about website downtime, the faster you can react by putting in place a proper recovery plan until the issue gets resolved.

Protect your website against malicious activities

One of the most useful benefits of an external monitoring service is it protects the website from malicious activities and alerts instantly as soon as such activity is identified. If any unauthorized attempt is made by the hackers to damage the website with DDoS attacks or by modifying the key files of the website, you will be notified immediately. An external website monitoring service provides you with all the information required to act on the issue and address the challenge before it causes severe performance degradation or site downtime.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitoring service uptime and check availability and performance of Internet-connected devices.