How much does your e-business lose when your web site goes down? Never thought of that? Recent estimates prove that every minute of downtime costs $460 to a mid-sized business. Think of downtime as not only repair costs but also as lost opportunities and missed customers. Downtime may be really expensive for your e-business, sometimes too expensive. The easiest way for your business and your customers is an external web site monitoring solution.
A web server may be down or experience troubles for thousands reasons. A thoroughly chosen web host is very important, but there are too many other factors that influence your web site uptime, performance, and stability. That is why advanced webmasters prefer web site monitoring services, which provide valuable help in a search of the potential bottlenecks of web site and web server infrastructure. Modern web site monitoring services are extremely powerful and offer a wide range of utilities and tools: they can monitor and measure absolutely everything: HTTP, HTTPS, e-mail servers (POP/SMTP), FTP servers, web site performance, and data integrity are a small part of what can be monitored by a commercial web site monitoring provider.
This is how web site monitoring works: 5-15 servers-agents, which are situated in different continents, check your web site status every minute or every 10 minutes (the frequency depends on the package you choose). If your web site replies too slowly or doesn’t reply at all, the notification process starts. Web monitoring services usually offer a few notification options: e-mail, phones, fax, pagers, SMS messages, etc. The frequency of monitoring defines the cost of the service – if you would like your web site to be monitored once per minute, you will have to pay much more. Once per 60 minutes is de-facto a standard for free web site monitoring packages.

