Monday, December 12, 2011

The Importance Of Server Monitoring - Don't Turn Away Website Visitors

By Greg Weir


When running an online business or internet site it is vitally significant that your website be available at all times. You might have set up your website at an internet host that gives a service level agreement that guarantees just about complete uptime, but how does one truly know that your website is always available?

Uptime appertains to network availability. Internet sites with higher uptime have bigger sales and are more successful in the internet marketplace, which is designed to provide continuing service to consumers and clients all around the world. Dependent on your site's traffic, a lack of uptime can reject hundreds, even thousands of visitors. By monitoring server uptime, you significantly increase internet site trustworthiness.

In order to know that your internet site is always up you want some kind of server monitoring software. There are free web based services that offer to monitor you site, but since many of these monitor hundreds, or perhaps thousands of sites they just can not check as often as a stand alone application running on one of your own machines.

In order to monitor server availability properly you need to have a PC that is hooked up to the internet 24/7. If needn't be a machine dedicated only to the job of network monitoring, rather it can be your daily workstation or laptop.

The benefit of running a stand alone server monitoring application is that you can choose to monitor whether the internet server is running by seeing if web pages are being served, whether the server is even reachable by pinging, or whether any other service that you will need to have available 24/7 like ftp or mail is working. Most free monitors only check whether the website server is replying. Stand alone applications can usually be configured to check any service that your web server provides. Stand alone server monitors may also be configured to test at what ever frequency you require, from every minute or two to hourly or longer. Naturally, if 100% uptime is your goal, you are going to want to check more frequently, but don't forget that the more frequently you check the more "hits" may show up in your logs and if you want to have accurate analysing you must remove the IP number of the machine or web serve that's monitoring your net server from your analysing reports.

Either way, stand alone or web-based monitoring of your internet site is significant to make sure that you aren't turing away visitors. If your site is a business a visitor is a future client and if it is hard for a customer to reach you they may never return. You should usually make sure you have some variety of monitoring service to promise you are providing the best service to your customers.




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