Does Your Website Need To Be Monitored?

The most critical element of your website's success, regardless of whether it's m arketing plastic surgeons or any other business, is that your site and servers be up and fully operational. Without that, all of your hard work spent optimizing your site for the search engines and promoting your website will be for naught. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things out of your control that can jeopardize your website's success, whether it be hackers, viruses, worms, hardware failures, software lockups and so on.

As such, your website may need a website monitoring service. Website monitoring services monitor the operational status and performance of websites using HTTP and/or HTTPS. There are also services offering email monitoring for SMTP servers and server monitoring for other server services like FTP. These monitoring services work by regularly connecting to your site or server service. If a connection cannot be made, you will then be contacted. Packages ranging from two minute to sixty minute checks are offered by most monitoring services, and pricing is usually based on this interval.

Different monitoring firms use different criteria in determining operational status. Firms using a ping request may be able to determine whether a server has power but may not guarantee the operational status of the website or server services. Other firms use more complex techniques that can prove more thorough. Most companies include detailed statistics and these can help you to determine if SLA and QOS agreements are being honored.

ebsite monitoring services can vary greatly in price. Some are free and others can cost as much as $99 per month.