How Do I Monitor Website Availability?

Many people contact us about using a tool to monitor website availability. The most common questions we get are: How can I monitor downtime? and What is a website availability monitoring tool? If you own or work for website, then website availability is definitely something that you want to monitor on a daily basis. Actually, website downtime can result in loss of money and even reputation damage. Luckily, there are many ways to monitor website availability and I'm going to share one of them with you today.

The first thing you need to do if website availability monitoring is important for your business is find the best website availability checking tool you can use.

There are two major ways to monitor website availability:

1) Through a service that notifies you if the site goes down

2) By setting up a monitoring tool on your own

Using a third party service is the most popular way of checking up on a website. A monitoring service like Robotalp works by periodically sending an HTTP request to the URL you've chosen to monitor. If they get no response from your website within 60 seconds or more, it's considered down. You can set custom thresholds for how long the outage must last before you're notified and also define notifications in various forms such as email, SMS or via some other channels.

Put simply, it's any way of getting notified when something happens on your website that you might want to know about (like downtime or slow response times). A website availability monitoring service like Robotalp will run an actual browser session from its data center through your website from time to time, usually from multiple IP addresses around the world. To simulate exactly how a real visitor would navigate through your website, the browser will load all of your site's assets - images, CSS files and javascript files.

A web server is only as good as how it responds to client requests. If your web site or online service is not available when users try to access it with their browsers, then you know you have a problem. For many types of hardware and software problems, availability monitoring is the best way to find out that an outage has occurred and let you respond before your customers contact you. 

If you want to know that end users can access your site, then it's important to check not only whether the web server responds within a certain time frame but also how fast your homepage loads.

This is exactly why website uptime should be monitored on a daily basis - website owners need to make sure their website is available 24/7/365 because website uptime directly affects customer satisfaction, website rankings and SEO.

Accounting for website downtime is very important in website planning. After all, when your website goes dark, you'll lose business - whether that's advertising revenue or transactions that may be taking place on your site between users and your partners. When website downtime happens, it can cost more in actual dollars than in lost opportunity costs. 

Uptime is extremely important for websites - and website availability monitoring tools can help you determine if your site is up or not. Monitoring website uptime will allow you to correct issues quickly before they become an even bigger problem and will help website owners sleep better at night knowing that their website is up and running. 

Remember that the first step towards success is planning! So don't wait until website becomes unavailable - monitor your website availability today!