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.
Website Monitoring for Availability
The real question becomes—how do you make sure that your website loads properly? Well, a great first step is to employ some type of third party monitoring. There are inherent problems with self-hosted monitoring because if your server is down, your monitoring software won’t function. On top of that, it can be difficult to set up, and problematic to configure.
Why an External Website Monitoring Service is Best
One of the best ways to monitor a site for uptime/downtime is by using an off-site solution that pings your site at specific intervals and is able to provide you with notification options. With UptimePal, you can monitor your site at 1-minute intervals, and get notified the instant that your site goes down. So what does this mean? Well, it means that you may be able to discover and remedy problems before your users have time to get upset…now how does that sound for a solution?
Sure, there are webmasters who may read this and scoff, but were also people who thought that Facebook was just a fad, right? The truth is that there is an increasing amount of importance being placed on website availability, both by search engines and users, which means that webmasters who fail to understand this may find themselves left behind while competitors who realize the value in uptime monitoring take their rightful place atop the digital mountain.
