Nowadays, people are using the Internet and related technologies on a daily basis. And if you are the business owner, then you should use it to reach to them with whatever your business has to offer. But to do that with the most efficiency, you need to ensure that your site is working in its best condition. And it is highly vital to understand how monitoring works and why website monitoring tools are important for it from the start. If you won’t use the best ones, you won’t be able to properly maintain the website you’re working with. And if you’re not keeping the site properly maintained, it will be almost the same as if you’re not providing maintenance to it at all. Although the situation won’t be that severe.
The Digital Business Landscape
Modern world utilizes every fruit of technological progress, and almost everyone uses it for their own convenience one way or another. Obviously, the Internet is one of those convenient things that progress gives to people. And companies are using that same Internet along with all of the wide variety of different devices and platforms to reach people and offer them their goods and services.
Basically, all that was said above is the cornerstone of the modern digital business landscape – a digital space where every person and every company can promote and offer their services to people. Hardware, software, all technologically advanced tools that people can use for their daily lives is a part of this digital business landscape. Search engines, advertising platforms, social networks, online media and a lot more things that are basically inseparable from modern people’s lives.
Of course, it obviously includes websites. And if you want your business to prosper, you must gain a solid and stable foothold on this landscape. To do this, you should use all means to make your main web resource, primarily site, be accessible to its customers round-the-clock and stable all the same. In other words, it is vital to use website monitoring all the time to back up your efforts in this matter so that those efforts won’t be completely useless because of the loss of reputation and ratings.
Taking that into account, otherwise it simply won’t be possible to promote your company in a way you want to. Because almost everything in the digital business landscape that rates sites in the digital business landscape will consider your project as unreliable and won’t give it high positions. SERP (search engine page results) ratings, advertising platforms and, more importantly, Internet users, will give your website a cold shoulder as soon as they notice that it’s not working as it should according to Google guidelines.
Why Website Performance Matters?
Website performance is one of the things you should not neglect if you want the said site to be appealing to its users as well as to search engines and advertising platforms along with them. Basically, if your website is performing well, always accessible to the audience and important third-party services, and working without issues – everyone and everything will rate it high. And this will obviously boost your efforts in promoting and developing the site along with the business it’s related to.
But it is important to understand what website performance is, why it matters and how to maintain it on a high level. Of course, performance itself is not a singular metric, but an overall rating of the site based on several metrics. To check the website’s performance as a whole, you can use the tool provided by Google, an author of performance guidelines. Its PageSpeed Insights was designed literally for this single purpose and it shows where the site is lacking in terms of performance. And then you can follow guidelines and improve it, if there’s something you need to improve.
Obviously, Insights won’t show you any concrete metrics – only ratings and guidelines. And that’s when you should understand why keeping the website under surveillance is a must. Simply put, you need reliable tools to keep your site in check to improve its performance by following the guidelines. Otherwise you simply won’t be able to do it in a proper way. So, you should use the best tools available, like the Host-Tracker site monitoring tool for any host check you need in an effort to improve your site.
The Role of Website Monitoring Tools
As it was stated above, every website must work at its best all the time to become successful in the eyes of the audience, advertising platforms and search engines. And, of course, it won’t do it by itself – the site is obviously not a ‘launch and forget’ thing, no matter how simple it is. It needs maintenance and supervision in order to make it work properly and follow the guidelines with requirements to be satisfying to users and all of the important services in the digital business landscape.
So, obviously, as the website’s owner or its webmaster, you should provide a certain degree of maintenance. And to do this, you must use site monitoring in an effort to find and fix all possible issues, therefore maintaining its stability and accessibility. And as it was already mentioned, the only solution to it is to use the best tools available. Reliable, automated and with additional ‘set up and forget’ functionality to maximize the result and effort. It will be of a great help in terms of maintaining the website’s performance and freeing your time along with it.
For instance, online website availability monitoring service Hosttracker will do the job just fine. It has a wide variety of accessibility, performance and network checks to cover all metrics of your site and find whether there are any issues with it. Of course, its setup procedure is designed in a way that’s so easy-to-understand and easy-to-use that even a novice can handle it. And on top of it, this platform has an instant notifications system that will send an alert message as soon as one of its checks fails due to problems with anything related to the website.
Common Features of Website Monitoring Tools
Website monitoring toolkits, despite having the best and the worst among them, have a lot of things that are similar. Basically, they are working on the same principles and with the same tools, but with some additional functionality or its absence. Obviously, almost all of them include the basic tools like HTTP checks, ping, traceroute, pagespeed and server port checks. Some of the toolkits also include SSL and domain name expiration validators and WHOIS database checks.
In terms of additional functionality, only a few platforms include DNSBL checks to avoid DNS block of the website or remove it properly if it happens. Also, almost none of the toolkits include content checks, database checks and server hardware status monitors. Not to mention the fact that not all of the platforms have properly working notification systems, although it’s a trend nowadays to make it work with almost all popular messengers. But, sadly, without phone calls or SMS messaging.
The best among the toolkits, like the HostTracker platform, have all of the above and a little more on top of it. Therefore, you can easily run ping url checker using host tracker manually or set up its automated usage, add surveillance of every site metric, configure the system to send easy-to-read reports, adjust detailed logging and make the service notify you whenever something happens. Via messengers, phone calls or SMS messages, however you like. Moreover, you will be able to set up everything so that the system will send alerts about different issues to different contacts.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Of course, every business owner knows that budget balance always counts. And monitoring tools are not an exception – it’s an obvious point of spending money on subscription fees. Obviously, so-called ‘powerful and free’ tools are nonexistent entities, so you will need to pay as soon as the trial period (and HostTracker has 30 days of it) ends. But if you think about it and count profits and losses, profits will be a lot higher.
Obviously, you need to think about all emergency situations in before and understand that you will lose audience, reputation and SERP rating as soon as you will stuck with site diagnostics without having a constant surveillance over the said site at hand. You will also lose money you spent on the website’s promotion and development, although not in a straight way – you’ll lose the product of your efforts, at least. Not to mention the loss of potential profits that could be the most damaging to the budget.
For instance, British Airways lost an insane amount of money in 2017 thanks to the data center outage. In less than two days they lost $112 million due to the need to cancel almost half a million flights. And in 2019 Facebook, when it wasn’t even Meta, lost $90 million. In less than a day – 14 hours of downtime led to the budget pit. Think how your company will handle ‘CPM (cost-per-minute) x minutes-of-downtime’ formula and count. Obviously, you will have a huge loss as a result, no matter the size of the and the audience of the website and potential customers.
And then you simply add the monitoring service cost and count again, this time with prevention of a whole lot of issues in mind. Mere $10 or so in a month has the potential to save you a sum ten of times higher. Thanks to the constant diagnostics such services like HostTracker provide, you will be able to quickly and easily resolve any issue with the website if it’s within your area of responsibility. Because as soon as something happens, you will be notified about it and will have all diagnostics reports at your disposal.
Conclusion
Taking into account everything that was said and mentioned, it’s a must for every website owner to have a constant monitoring over the said website. It won’t cost much, even if you use the best platform available like the HostTracker service, but it will help to save a whole lot of money. It will help you to save your site’s and its customer audience, SERP ratings and, more importantly, money spent on advertising and promotion as well as potential profits.
Because having such services always at hand in up and running state will help with maintaining the website’s stability, performance and availability all the time, and fix issues as soon as they occur. Moreover, it will be relatively easy to find and fix long-running problems that are arising repeatedly. That’s why it’s highly important to every website owner who wants to keep the site in a high position inside its digital business landscape (including user satisfaction and SERP ratings), as well as inside its specific niche and beyond it.
