Why Your Web Site need Uptime Monitoring to “Live"

Studies show that while many businesses are investing in expensive metrics packages, they neglect something as obvious as monitoring that their website is up and running. Reliably, 24-7. A web metrics package that is designed to give you intimate detail about your visitors habits is useless, if the underlying site is dead. Whether it’s a server problem, a web hosting SNAFU, a DNS foul up or a problem with billing. Dead websites don’t generate cash!

Our company is in the business of Click Fraud Detection, and every once in a while we get complaints from our clients that they are not getting any visitors to their site, but are getting charged by Google. Incredible as it may seem, sometimes their PPC cost is over 5 dollar/ Click. While click fraud does exist, and it may even be rampant—sometimes a much more mundane problem is to be blamed. Site downtime.

This seemingly easy to monitor problem sometimes cost our customers megabucks—the search engine charges our clients whether the page displays something, shows a hacked page, the infamous 404 redirect or nothing at all. These people are essentially paying 5 dollar/ click to have alienated customers.

Why would people disregard such an obvious issue. Part of it is the reliability statistics that their web hosting companies claim, that are meant to lull the site owner. It’s also because they don’t think it’s worth the 60-200 dollar/year/website for monitoring service of their website. They also don’t think they would benefit, because they don’t have access to E-mail all the time.

Lets break down these myths. The web hosting companies claims notwithstanding, even 99% reliability means that their site will be down around 88 hours every year. That is, or should be unacceptable. For a reasonable traffic site, it should be constituted a disaster. Even if the site is only making money through CPM/CPC advertising, the lost opportunity is simply too big to ignore. Furthermore, the search engines drop ranks if the site doesn’t show up when they crawl. Site hacking is another unfortunate phenomenon and it happens more than most people expect. Given the other myriad of problems that could occur, this number could be a lot larger if not checked in time.

While saving a few dollars a month and spending major dollars on maintaining/promoting the site may sound like false economy there are some free options as well. Some established companies give away the site uptime service in order to attract customers for other businesses. As long as there are no strings attached, this is a great way to go. As an example, Sofizar(www.sofizar.com )gives away the site uptime service for free at http://www.24hourcontact.com.

Another factor to keep in mind is that some of these companies SMS you on your cell phone if your site ever goes down. So, you could be out bowling, skiing or even sleeping when you can get notified of the site downtime. While the SMS may wake you up, it should hopefully prevent sleepless nights. You should be able to specify an escalation schedule and go from there. It’s a feature worth looking for, when evaluating the uptime company.

A natural question to ask is, what if the site uptime company itself goes down? Who is minding the minder so to speak. Here, the reputation of the company is very important. You want to go with a company that has been in business for a few years and which can demonstrate that they have geographical redundancy. In other words, they have POP(Point of Presence) in at least 3 different continents and the servers can monitor each other as peers. Without this level of redundancy, we can have false alarms, or not report real alarms.

A point that many people overlook is that having your website up, is not enough. You need to be able to check contents on your website. If a website does get hacked, or if the page gets trashed, a ping to the website will still show it live, while human visitors will not benefit. Therefore, the service for uptime must use “content check" to see if the marker is present.

While site uptime alone is not going to make your site a roaring success, it is cheap ( or free ) insurance against mishaps, allowing you to focus on the goals of your site.