What is Website Monitoring?
Website monitoring is the process of running detailed and all-encompassing tests on website performance by testing that the end-user can access with ease and without interruptions a website or application. This monitoring is carried out in order to ensure that a website uptime is performing effectively and that the end-user or visitor can interact at ease with the website.
Website monitoring services collect vast amounts of website and application data including load time, server response, latency, page performance enabling companies to ensure that their websites are available at all times to online customers and minimize any potential transaction and sale losses by not being available on the internet.
Website monitoring companies help online businesses to check regularly their websites for availability and functionality by using different servers located all over the world in order to detect issues caused by local or international connectivity. Website monitoring services’ main objective is to inform immediately the technical support team of any web performance and availability incidents as soon as they are detected.
Monitoring website performance is the very first step, however, is critical for online businesses to be notified as quickly as possible of any downtime issues. Monitoring companies, therefore, report on these tests in a number of ways when downtime errors are detected by sending downtime notifications via email, SMS, Social Media Channels, and instant messaging platforms such as Slack.
How Does Website Monitoring Work?
Website monitoring works by sending pings to different components of a website, application, or server checking for their availability at different intervals and from different locations around the world with the objective of checking their availability online. In other words, website monitoring imitates a real online user with a real browser by visiting the website or application and examining what has been loaded.
These availability checks are done by sending real-time HTTP requests to the website, server, or application and the response status codes are confirmed. Website monitoring can also notify you if there are any changes on a specific page as well as checking for breaking points and in this way helping you improve the performance of your systems straight away.
Website monitoring services use servers to track the status of a website, server, or application by testing them every day of the week and 24 hours a day. The monitoring service works by checking that the website or application is working and running effectively and in case that the monitoring service finds that there are issues with performance or connectivity, it will send you alerts informing you by email, instant messaging, or text.
For example, uptime monitoring services are dedicated to helping online businesses and organizations to check that they are available on the internet and can function with the end-user without interruptions. Uptime monitoring services allow businesses to check the website or web applications are available to customers continuously. A traffic monitoring service on the other hand can inform website managers if the website is having problems online and experiencing traffic interruptions that will indicate downtime periods.
External website monitoring is dedicated to monitoring the website’s performance outside the organization’s firewall with the objective of checking the end-user experience. This type of external monitoring is carried out by tests that check the performance of the website across the internet and also called uptime monitoring. Uptime monitoring helps to pinpoint to the causes of website downtime and where it occurred.
Uptime monitoring is a reliable website monitoring service offering advanced features such as SSL monitoring, domain monitoring, server monitoring, virus scanning and page-speed monitoring. This type of monitoring offers peace of mind to webmasters by ensuring that they get notified if load times are slow and that a website is available online across the internet.
Percentage Measure of Website Availability
In simple words website availability or uptime is the measurement of uninterrupted time that a hosted system experiences on the internet, as a web administrator your main objective is to manage your website connectivity to be as close to 100% with zero downtime but this is really impossible to achieve. Web administrators want to keep the servers working and available to the internet with as little downtime as possible.
Therefore is very important to make sure your website or app is available online as otherwise, it would have a very negative impact on your business operations as visitors to your website and online customers may not be able to transact with you and also will negatively impact your search rankings with Google.
Uptime is described as a % number and is calculated based on the number of hours that the server is available online in a given period of time. As an example, lets look at the calculation below for annual uptime:
# of Hours Uptime / # Hours Per Year multiplied by 100
- Total hours in a year: 8,760
- If there were a total of 4 hours of downtime in the year, then:
8,756 (8,760 – 4) / 8,760 x 100 = 99.95% Uptime for the year
Main Type of Uptime Notification Options
Uptime monitoring companies use a number of reporting methods to communicate the test results for when errors are found and so that immediate action is taken. These alerts are sent via email, SMS, telephone, social media channels, and instant messaging platforms such as Slack and Skype. The test results enable the network administrator and webmasters to fix any downtime issues as soon as they occur and minimize further potential financial losses.
So is vital for online businesses to have in place a wide range of alerting tools and get downtime alerts quickly to enable downtime recovery underway. With StatusCake uptime monitoring services, customers get alerted of any downtime issues as soon as they are detected enabling the IT team to get a resolution right away. The service provides website monitoring and sends alerts when a user’s website goes down or is experiencing other technical problems such as being slow to load.
Website Monitoring Services Options
When subscribed to a paying hosting service, most web hosting companies claim to offer 99.99% uptime availability, however, such a high percentage of uptime can’t really be achieved as there are many unexpected problems that may take place during the year. For example, hardware problems, problems with networks, carriers, and hosting servers’ issues will most likely take your website down.
Therefore, is vital for every website owner and administrator to ensure that if your website goes offline, there are monitors and alerts in place to inform you as soon as possible of these issues and so that your IT administrator can fix these problems right away.
StatusCake Website & Uptime Monitoring Services
StatusCake website and uptime performance monitoring services offer website administrators powerful monitoring tools to ensure your website is up and running and loading as expected. StatusCake monitoring network uses over 200 monitoring servers located around the world and in every single continent checking your site availability wherever your customers are.
StatusCake offers all new customers a free uptime monitoring plan allowing you to run up to 10 uptime tests of 5 minutes interval each as well as a 1-page speed to test the load time of a page as part of the free uptime monitoring plan. All customers in the free sign up plan are informed via email if there are any uptime issues with their websites.
You can sign up for your free uptime monitoring account by visiting StatusCake here
StatusCake website and uptime monitoring services offer an easy to use monitoring and alerting service available to all types of websites and in every product vertical. As mentioned above there is the free option for new customers to try the service and in addition to this, StatusCake offers 2 additional paid packages for both monthly and annual subscriptions.
The Superior plan starts at £14.99 per month and £12.49 per month when paid annually, this package offers 100 uptime tests at the 1-minute interval, 15 Page Speed Tests of 15 minutes interval, 50 SSL Monitors, 3 Server Monitors, and 50 Domain Monitors. Customers are also eligible to 2 months free when signing up to the Superior Plan yearly.
StatusCake not only monitors your website for downtime errors but also provides businesses with frequent and regular reports of outages via email alerts, text, social media, and instant messaging platforms such as Slack.
You can sign up to our Superior Plan for uptime monitoring services by visiting StatusCake here
StatusCake also has a Business Plan which offers more advanced monitoring features with plans starting at £49.99 per month and £41.66 per month when subscribing to the annual plan and when going for the annual subscription you get 2 months for free!
StatusCake customer in the Business plan allows it users to run up to 300 uptime tests with a 30 seconds interval, 30 Page Speed tests at checking intervals of 5 minutes, 100 SSL Monitors, 10 Server Monitors, and 120 Domain Monitors. As with the Superior Plan, customers get frequent and regular reports via email, text, social media, and instant messaging platforms.
Customers considering any of the uptime monitoring paid plans can take advantage of StatusCake 7 Free day trial across all the paid-for plans, with no credit card required, giving you access to all the useful uptime monitoring tools to gain an insight of what to expect fromStatusCake uptime and website monitoring services
You can sign up to our Business Plan for uptime monitoring services by visiting StatusCake here
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