Key Takeaways
- Website uptime monitoring is essential for any serious business. Without proper uptime monitoring, there’s no reliable way to know if your website is online and serving users until they report it to you or someone in your organization notices a problem.
- Uptime monitoring goes beyond simply knowing if your website is online. Serious uptime monitoring tracks your website from various locations and gives you tools to alert your team in various ways to any downtime can be promptly addressed and prevented in the future.
Website downtime is a serious concern for businesses as it directly impacts the bottom line and can cause significant downstream effects as users turn to alternatives. You and your team can spend hundreds of hours to improve your websites, add new features, and create great content. If your website comes down at a critical moment, these efforts are wasted and users are left wondering about your business’ ability to function in the digital world.
It’s absolutely essential to know when your website is facing downtime, how you can restore it, and steps you can take to make sure it doesn’t happen again. For these reasons, uptime monitoring tools like ours at Dotcom-Monitor exist to give teams ways to comprehensively monitor their websites and receive alerts when issues arise.
Many factors affect a website’s availability, and numerous issues can result in downtime. In this article, we’ll look further at uptime, why it’s essential, and what you can do to maximize it for your mission-critical websites.
What Is Website Uptime?
The moment your website is available to users, that is “uptime.” Uptime is generally expressed as the percentage of time your website spends being available versus when it’s down, or is in “downtime.” Because maintenance and renovation efforts sometimes require a website to go offline, a 100% rate of uptime is near impossible.
What we want is to maximize uptime and avoid unplanned downtime. Planned downtime users can and will accept as a natural part of their online experience. If a site suddenly comes down for no reason, however, you’ve got a serious problem.
Proper website hosting is key here, and uptime is one of the most important metrics to take into consideration when you source a hosting provider. It can’t be stressed enough: if you want to maximize returns for your business’ activity online, you must invest in a web hosting service that can sustain a high uptime percentage.
What Is Website Uptime Monitoring
An uptime monitor like ours at Dotcom-Monitor serves to alert you as soon as a website experiences downtime, over multiple locations. You can tailor your alerts to trigger at various stages of downtime, and escalate the issue to different parties if downtime persists beyond a given period of time, via email or SMS. A downtime alert means there’s an issue, so you and your team can immediately jump in and try to remedy it.
What Happens Without Website Uptime Monitoring
Website downtime is often an indicator of an underlying issue that needs a proper resolution to prevent further downtime. If you don’t gather information related to the issue using an uptime monitoring tool, the problems will persist and recur.
Uptime monitoring serves as the foundation for your business’ success because it helps you to analyze the root cause behind issues and hence clear the path for the future. Proper uptime monitoring like ours at Dotcom-Monitor doesn’t simply give you an up/down indicator – it helps you and your team drill into the root cause with sophisticated analysis and easy-to-understand reports.
Imagine this scenario: a website goes down because the DNS server has stopped responding. Not knowing your website has come down, you continue business operations as usual. You’re paying for traffic from Google and Facebook, perhaps thousands of dollars a week. This traffic will continue to hit your website and these companies will bill you whether your website is down or not. Obviously this is a serious issue.
After only a few minutes of unplanned downtime, your losses have already begun to accumulate, but because you aren’t running proper uptime monitoring, you don’t know what causes the downtime, and so you can’t fix it immediately and have no idea how to prevent it from happening in the future. This is a disaster.
Under pressure now, you hire an expensive QA Analyst who charges you more than what an uptime monitoring tool would have cost you. The QA Analyst takes time to run some tests to understand what has gone wrong with your website. In the meantime, you’ve had to pause your PPC campaigns and continue to lose business as your customers abandon your crashed site and go to the competition. The downstream effects of this can impact your goals and revenue for years to come, as customers abandon your business for an alternative.
Your QA Analyst does the job and discovers what went wrong with your website to cause the downtime, but there’s no reason to celebrate. All of this could’ve been avoided had you invested in an uptime monitoring tool up front.
The simple solution to save money and avoid this nightmare scenario is our comprehensive uptime and performance monitoring platform at Dotcom-Monitor. The pitfalls of failing to have proper uptime in place for your website include:
- Productivity loss
- Wasted PPC and SEO Spends
- Recovery Cost
- Damage to Your Brand’s Reputation
- Revenue Loss
The Benefits of Using a Website Uptime Monitoring Tool
After downtime occurs, how quickly you can return it to an uptime state depends on how fast you can take corrective actions. The answer, again, is uptime monitoring with Dotcom-Monitor.
You and your team deserve an uptime monitoring tool that alerts you as soon as your website goes “down,” and which monitors from different locations and generates user-readable reports. Your website may appear to work fine where you’re located, but for users elsewhere it may be down. The only way to truly monitor websites across locations is to use professional uptime monitoring.
How to Calculate Website Uptime Percentage
Basic math allows us to find any website’s uptime percentage. You can divide the time your website is “up” with the total time your website spends on the internet, and multiply it by 100 to get the percentage.
Unless your business serves a critical function, such as a hospital database or critical alert system, a 99.9% uptime ratio is generally considered satisfactory. You may have a website that undergoes significant and ongoing development, in which case planned downtime might be expected. You can always remove planned downtime from your uptime calculations, or factor it in for the most accurate report to stakeholders.
What Website Uptime Monitoring Tools Monitor
A website’s availability depends on several factors. A truly useful uptime monitoring tool monitors each of these components to give you an overall picture. Once you’ve analyzed these components, you can create a plan to implement changes. Here are some of the critical components that impact your website’s availability, and which uptime monitoring tools help you to automatically monitor.
DNS
The DNS (Domain Name System) is a system of records of domain names and IP addresses that allows browsers to identify IP addresses that correspond to hostname URLs. Working DNS is critical to website uptime because it fulfills user requests in a timely way.
CDN
Content Delivery Networks supply content to the user’s device once a request is processed. A CDN is placed as close to the end-user as possible to increase efficiency and decrease latency. If your CDN experiences issues, this can cause downtime.
Servers
A web server is a combination of hardware and software that uses software and hardware that uses HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and other protocols to respond to user’s requests. If your websites’ servers experience issues, this can cause downtime.
Use Dotcom-Monitor for Uptime Monitoring
With our uptime monitoring platform at Dotcom-Monitor, you have a comprehensive platform for serious uptime and performance monitoring and a trusted partner in the space. You can schedule a one-on-one demo or experiment with the software on your own and start monitoring today with a free trial.
