How a Site Monitoring Service Works
Uptime plays a very significant role in maintaining a good presence in the internet which is important. An outage of any length can be expensive Service downtime can case loss in revenue and other factors in business which can affect your organization. It may also impact your company’s image or reputation. It is known to many that a downtime is always a risk.
Some unforeseen troubles will still bring a site down sometimes even if it is made error-tolerant, stable and secure. It is natural with complex-structured systems. You will have to look for a good service in website monitoring to keep watch of your site and get you notified when something wrong happens.
A lot of low-priced services have blossomed in the past years, still beware. Many of them are more than just simple codes that are hosted in what is called “the cloud” and runs on shared servers.
Look for the following qualities when searching for a good site monitoring service:
1. Redundancy: Only few services are maintaining more than just one NOC or Network Operations Center. Many of them do not have full control during critical situations because the operations are run on shared server and is hosted by a an outside company. It is important that you make sure your service is hosted within a private server. Monitoring services that are maintained in separated NOCs will back you up in times of trouble especially when there are network outages like connection interruption, DoS or denial-of-service attacks, power failure and many others.
2. Different monitoring Locations: Many of these services are only monitoring from just one or two positions. If theses services receive and error when they connect to your site, they would have no idea if you really are down or they have lost their connection. The outcome will constantly be false alarm. It is necessary that you go for the service that can monitor in many different locations and is designed to connect to other locations to verify if a real problem is happening so you are convinced when you receive an error.
3. The Interval of Monitoring: Do you think it is okay to simply check your site once per hour or less? This is just what many services do. Be sure that your monitoring service is able to provide you with a good set of intervals that you can select from so you can adjust the configurations to just what you need. The best monitoring services are those that let you monitor with just a minute interval for your website.
4. Methods of Notifying: A lot of services only send alerts through email. Email alerts are a good defense, however, there lots of things that can absolutely hinder an email delivery and this is a great danger specifically when you don’t receive a crucial alert. Excellent services will provide you the option of getting SMS alerts. Always make sure that you are not using your service provider’s email-to-sms feature, but rather a real text message delivery. Though email and SMS alerts are required, good services also offer the option for you to receive a phone call when problems occur. When you answer, an automated voice will provide you full information of what the trouble is and what is affected.
A good online presence will always be a product of a good service and of course your hard work. Nevertheless, it still be down for any unexpected reason that will occur, be prepared. Be sure that you are under the protection of a good monitoring service. Look for the company that works and renders quality service for websites.
The Author: Jeffrey Hillan is a freelance writer and blogger. He enjoys keeping up on the latest industry news, writing, and having a nice cup of coffee. Get more details about this article’s subject: http://www.theprober.com/blog/new-ways-to-automate-your-website-testing-and-monitoring You can find more articles on the author’s profile page.