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Uptime Monitoring: Holding Your Web Hosting Company to their SLA

By | July 30th, 2014|Website Monitoring|

The Benefits of Uptime Monitoring Are you considering uptime monitoring, but don’t know if it will be useful enough? Well, beyond knowing when your site is up/down and being able to proactively take care of problems, you could be costing yourself money every month by not holding your web host accountable to their service level agreement, or SLA.  Let’s take a closer look at what SLAs are, and how you can use a service like UptimePal to make sure that your web hosting SLA is met and your host company keeps up their end of the bargain. Understanding a Web Hosting SLA Most web hosts have a set level of uptime that they must meet spelled out in their service level agreement. You may recall seeing web hosts advertising things like “99.9% uptime” or other similar metrics. This metric usually means that a web host must have operational servers 99.9% of the time or more in order to meet the terms of their SLA. This is typically a selling point for web hosting because people are often looking to for the most reliable hosting that they can find. The greater the uptime number the better the service. So, what happens if a web host falls short of this number? Well, that depends on what else is in the SLA. Sometimes SLAs can be lengthy documents, and there is often language in the agreement that specifies exactly what counts as downtime, and other various stipulations. If a web host doesn’t meet their end of the SLA, then they may offer a certain amount of money back, free services for a period of time, or other benefits. Again, this would be determined by the exact language in an SLA, so you should review yours carefully. […]

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How Frequently Should You Monitor Your Website?

By | July 2nd, 2014|Website Monitoring|

Selecting the right website monitoring frequency is a matter of individual performance requirements and ROI. Optimum Frequency to Monitor Website State Changes Website monitoring frequency is something that’s been debated among e-commerce and web performance junkies for years. Perhaps you’re wondering, “What is the optimum frequency to monitor website state changes such as uptime/downtime”? Like many other things in the webmaster world, it’s really a question that boils down to the individual website performance requirements of your organization. Faster Frequency to Monitor Website Uptime/Downtime A faster monitoring frequency is always better — the only problem with that is it is usually relatively expensive. The reason that the cost has historically been higher (and still is with most competitors within the industry) is because a shorter monitoring frequency uses more resources on the server, costing the service provider more. Therefore, customers generally have to pay more for a high frequency. […]

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User Experience Monitoring: How do Users React to a Website Outage?

By | June 12th, 2014|Website Down, Website Monitoring|

Monitoring your website for uptime/downtime provides a consistent user experience that keeps your customers happy.   Keeping your End Users Happy End Users, readers, website visitors… whatever term you’d like to use, these are people who visit your site; people who have power to make your site popular or unpopular—people who have the power to make your site succeed or fail. With that said, doesn’t it make sense to keep these people happy? Whether you have a small foodie blog, or a giant e-commerce website, you still need to keep these end users satisfied, and one of the best ways to do that (beyond great customer service and a great product or service offering) is to implement user experience monitoring to make sure that your website is operating properly. Website Monitoring Leads to a Good User Experience One of the worst things for your reputation as a blogger, webmaster, or e-business owner is an error-prone, problematic website. This can be especially bad if you’ve spent time working on promoting your site, only to have people visit it and find that it’s down. There are a number of reasons why a website may not load properly which can include hosting or server problems, issues with the CMS (such as WordPress), security problems (such as hackers), and other various issues. Whatever the problem, if you care about your visitors, it’s important to know when there’s a problem as soon as possible so you can take steps to remedy it before end users notice or lose trust in your website. […]

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Internal vs External Website Monitoring Service – Website Monitoring for Availability

By | May 3rd, 2014|Website Monitoring|

It’s no secret that an inaccessible website is worthless website, but the question is—how do you know if your site is inaccessible? Do you wait for emails from frustrated users to come pouring in? Do you check it periodically yourself? If you take more than a few seconds to answer that question, you could be headed down the wrong path as a webmaster. Let’s take a moment to look at this in a more in-depth manner. The Broadband Age First of all, it’s important to note that times have changed; we’re not living in the 90’s anymore, in the golden age of the internet. We’re living in the broadband age, where nearly every person has a smartphone with a 4G LTE connection, broadband internet at home, and access to high-speed internet wherever they are. With that said, people don’t have the patience anymore for websites that fail to load—yes, gone are the days of dial-up modems, waiting to connect, and errors at every turn. Users expect sites to load on command, and because of that, they tend to have very little trust for sites that don’t load or are error-prone. […]

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