Website monitoring services can not ensure that your website stays up and running, but it can also give you peace of mind.

It is the middle of the night, and your site has gone down. Soundly asleep in your bed, you are not aware of this – and neither is your Web Hosting Company. You are not earning money while you sleep – you are losing it! You’ve designed a website that was meant to be available to your customers twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year – and it’s not happening.

There are many things that can cause a server to go down; however problems are not limited to server outages. For example, the site could become slow, due to an overwhelming amount of traffic. There may be a software or hardware failure that is causing some problem on your site. No matter what has gone wrong, it is vital that you find out about it as quickly as possible, so that it can be taken care of. This is where a website monitoring service comes into play.

A website monitoring service will alert you if your site goes down – automatically. There are literally hundreds of website monitoring services to choose from, and they range in prices, from free to about $60 per month. Obviously, the paid services tend to offer more features and greater service than the free ones. Also, while a free service may just monitor one site, a paid service will usually monitor multiple sites.

The service does not monitor your site or sites all the time, however. It checks the site at specified intervals. Some services will check every three to five minutes, others will check every 15 to 30 minutes, and some will just check every hour. Usually, it is the paid services that monitor the site more frequently.

Here is how it works: The monitoring service uses automated software to send a request to the website it is monitoring. The website sends a response back to the monitoring service that essentially says ‘all is well.’ But it gets a little more complicated, as a good monitoring service will send requests to the website from various locations around the world to ensure that the site is available everywhere.

When the site responds to the monitoring services request, it is done so in code. If it sends back a code of 200, 301, 302, 401, or 403, it means that everything is okay. However, if no code comes back, or a code comes back that indicates that the site is not reachable, the monitoring service will send a request from another location, and then another. Most services will check three times before they ‘sound the alert.’

A monitoring service sends an alert to the designated person in numerous ways. An email may be sent, or an alert may be sent to a cell phone, pager, or PDA. Remember that the monitoring service is only designed to do that – monitor and alert. It does nothing beyond this. Once you’ve received the alert, it is up to you to get in touch with your Web Hosting Company to find out what is going on.

Many of the better monitoring services offer services that go beyond monitoring. For example, they may provide you with helpful statistics about your site. With this information, you can see just how often the site goes down, or how often other problems are experienced on your site.

After viewing website monitoring services reports, you may be satisfied with the Web Hosting service that you are using, or completely dissatisfied. If your site is down a large portion of the time – even just ten percent of the time – you most likely need a new hosting company.