Website Monitoring Services: Who Is Keeping Your Web Host In Check?

When you signed up for the hosting package for your website, you were probably promised something like 99.9 percent uptime. The question is, how do you really know whether or not your hosting company is actually delivering on that promise? While nearly everyone realizes the significance of downtime and the impact it can have on ecommerce profits, not everyone knows how to keep an eye on the uptime their hosting service is providing and how to minimize downtime and profit loss due to downtime.

What That Uptime Guarantee Really Means First things first… Let’s take a close look at that uptime guarantee your hosting provider quoted when you signed up for hosting service. Let’s say the uptime rate promised to you was 99.9 percent. There are a few things you need to know about this “guarantee”. First and foremost, this only covers unplanned downtime. If your site goes down due to planned server maintenance or upgrades, it is not covered in the 99.9 percent promise. Furthermore, when it comes to collecting damages for any downtime that exceeds what you were promised, you can only collect the actual cost of what you paid the hosting provider for that amount of time.

For example, if your hosting provider promised you 99.9 percent uptime but only provided 98.9 percent uptime, the hourly difference in that uptime divided by what you pay your web host each month is the only monetary compensation you will be entitled to. No hosting provider offers to pay for lost sales or other damages due to excessive downtime, which is why it is important to utilize a website monitoring service to ensure that your web host remains on the ball in terms of keeping your site up and running.

How Your Website Monitoring Service Keeps Your Hosting Provider in Check If your hosting provider is dropping the ball, chances are they aren’t going to tell you about it. You may or may not become aware of an increase in downtime if you don’t have website monitoring service in place to monitor exactly how much downtime your site is experiencing. Furthermore, without website monitoring service in place, you have no way of knowing if your site is experiencing performance issues in addition to downtime issues.

When you utilize the services of a quality website monitoring service, you will be made aware of issues with downtime and performance and will be able to determine what is causing the issues. If it is indeed the service of your hosting provider that is lacking, you may simply need to upgrade your hosting plan or you may need to change hosting providers altogether.

Knowing Who to Trust Since website downtime and performance issues are the two biggest threats to an ecommerce business, you want to make sure you have those two things under control. Since you cannot possibly monitor your site manually 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, you need to partner with a service that can. That means investing in quality website monitoring service to keep an eye on your site and ensure that your hosting provider is keeping up their end of the uptime deal. When it comes to website performance issues and website downtime, you need to be the first to know when it happens to your site and why it is happening. The only way you can ensure this is by implementing a website monitoring service as a part of your critical business operations.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. Alertra's website monitoring price is monthly and starts at USD $0.20 (20 cents) per URL for 60 minute monitoring. It will provide timely alert notifications and access to detailed reporting. Since April, 2000, Alertra provided website monitor services to more than 10,000 businesses and other organizations.website monitoring pricewebsite monitor