Operators of e-commerce websites know factors like reliability, credibility and accessibility are what can make or break your business. Repeated downtime or slow response times can occur either because a site receives an unexpected number of hits one day or has a serious flaw in its coding architecture.
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But there are companies and services that can help you become more aware of these problems to ensure the greatest success for your business. Website monitoring services check the status of your server, email and website at regular intervals and notify you via email, SMS or any other mode of communication any time your site goes down.
According to a study by Zona Research, slow websites cost $25 billion in lost sales. This includes more than $21 billion per year lost when users abandon websites because of excessive delays in Web page downloads. Other benefits include preventing the loss of credibility to your customers, increased productivity of your Web applications, like shopping carts, and detailed statistics about your website's overall availability and response times so that you can track how often your site hits a glitch.
As with most applications today, you can find many website monitoring services available as hosted services so you don't have to worry about downloading and installing any extra software and you can set the service up through an easy-to-use control panel.
SiteUptime (siteuptime.com) says its services are designed to provide a fast, effective and automated method for checking the availability of a website and that its multiple monitoring servers around the world run protocol based tests at specific intervals, like every two, five, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, 24 hours per day, seven days per week to ensure that site visitors can reach your site. SiteUptime offers a free service that monitors your Web server, POP3 and SMTP email servers and FTP server and offers monthly reports as well as public statistics. You can also get a more thorough monitoring service starting at $5.00 a month.
Alerta (alerta.com) also offers a similar service using its multi-POP monitoring stations around the world to test your Web servers, network services and hardware devices to ensure reliable uptime. It notifies clients by phone, SMS, email, instant messenger and pager and charges per service on a monthly basis.
There is also WebSitePulse (websitepulse.com), which monitors any type of server, network device and e-commerce application and provides full-page downloads with real-time website alerts, which are generated if there's a Web page error or website performance problems occur. WebSitePulse offers a customized pricing structure as well, so you can ask the company directly for an immediate quote based on what types of monitoring services you're looking for.
