by Angela Kaye Mason
| Jan 31, 2013
With technology advancing faster than we can keep up, there are literally thousands of new websites springing up every day. Websites for games, for special interests, to share photos, even to start a small business are launched daily as the internet continues to grow like a wild frontier. But even with all of this new territory being expanded upon, is a constant monitor really needed? Let’s look a a few reasons why website monitoring is a good idea.
Speed and Performance
Almost everyone is aware that website monitoring can help to keep up with the speed and performance of your site. Known as “availability monitoring,” this is one of the most popular reasons that website owners decide to go with website monitoring services. An external pinger will visit the site, normally every minute, and check to see if it is functioning as it should. The response of the server is recorded as it checks to see if there were any errors or timeouts. If a failure of the website is found, most monitoring services will send an email, SMS message, or both to notify the website owner. The history is also stored in a database, where it can be reviewed at any time. This type of monitoring is very important to make sure that your website is performing quickly and correctly. This not only makes your site look more professional and welcoming to visitors, but helps it to rank higher as well.
Monitoring to Avoid Hackers
If you spend any time at all on the internet, it is sadly easy to see how much hacking has advanced in recent years. Even those whose online experience is limited to Facebook and Twitter have had their share of dealing with hackers. Once your website has been accessed by a hacker, just a tiny bit of code or a file added somewhere that you wouldn’t normally look can be devastating to the site. This can cause all sorts of issues, from extremely slow loading times to the spreading of malware to your website’s viewers. Once this has happened, all of the work that you put into making sure that the site was fast and clean can be in vain.
Most of the time, website owners don’t even perform regular checks on their websites. Those who do are not able to find these kinds of attacks by hackers. If you have a website monitoring service to keep track of things for you can catch such issues before they can cause damage to your site or your company. Long term, problems such as this can cause search engines to reject your site. Without website monitoring, these search engines will often be the first to discover any issues such as page changes, irrelevant content, and slow sites. Once discovered, they will not notify you of the problem as a monitoring service would. Instead, they will assume that the fault is your own, and your website will be dropped from their search engine results, and you will be “blacklisted.” Many sites, such as Google, always assume that the fault of any suspicious or malicious activity from a website is the responsibility of the site owner.
All of these reasons and more combine to show why it is vital to your site’s success that you have a website monitoring service. Not only can a monitoring service keep your site from becoming slow and look for any issues that it may have, but any malicious activity can also be detected early enough to keep you from becoming blacklisted. With regular monitoring, you can keep your site fast and your content safe. To those who wish to be responsible and pro-active in the maintenance of their business and it’s website will always choose to go with a website monitoring service.
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