It is important for any website to have the largest possible audience. And to achieve this, the website owner or webmaster should put a lot of effort. Because it is necessary to invest a lot of effort and money to promote the website via advertising campaigns and search engine optimization. But despite the importance of these things, there is one more, critical for the existence and development of the website. And it is about ensuring a permanent stable performance and availability of the website or uptime. If you do not maintain it at a level close to 100% availability, then all the ratings will go down. And to do this, the webmaster needs to constantly monitor the website.
Website monitoring importance
These days, a slow and inaccessible website is your worst enemy. Literally. If your website is slow, people won’t linger and wait. It’s even worse if the website is completely inaccessible. Users and visitors will leave quickly, lowering your page ranking. This process continues until your website is completely forgotten. Therefore, if you want to stay competitive, you need to monitor your website as effectively as possible.
Website monitoring is extremely important if only because it allows the website owner or webmaster to ensure all of the functionality of the website. And there is no functionality for a website without constant availability, high performance (page and content loading speeds) and all functions working correctly. This is critical for any project, especially a business, regardless of its focus. Especially if you always keep in mind the simple fact that competitors can always be better.
Users simply won’t visit a poorly performing website. And if it used to work well, the old audience will start leaving it too. And, of course, all those users and customers will go to a competitor. Not to mention the decline of the website’s ranking in search engines and advertising.
Manual website monitoring
Basically, website monitoring is a comprehensive diagnosis of a website by the owner or webmaster. This is so that the webmaster or website owner can identify the source of website problems as efficiently as possible. Thus, every webmaster needs to:
- Check website availability via HTTP, ICMP (ping), SMTP, SNMP, TCP.
- Monitor website content and databases.
- Make sure the domain/IP address is on one of the known DNSBL blacklists.
- Watch for expiration of domain and security certificates.
- Determine the page responsiveness and loading speed.
- Real-time server performance diagnostics.
Most webmasters usually use various services and software to monitor websites. However, webmasters often lack information and will likely never know exactly what happened at any given time. In addition, in order to figure out the problem, the webmaster has to look through logs, write to the hosting support service and perform many other tedious and often unsuccessful actions.
It also sometimes happens that a website is inaccessible from some country. Or when users access the website, some of the content doesn’t load. And it can also happen that active elements of the website don’t work. And such problems, unfortunately for the webmaster, can go unnoticed for a long time. Even a properly configured website monitoring will not let you know for sure that these kinds of problems exist. Moreover, users are also unlikely to tell about it through the feedback form. That is why webmasters today are increasingly using automated website monitoring.
Automated website monitoring
As already mentioned, webmasters usually use automatic monitoring services for this purpose. And HostTracker is one of the best services in this niche. This service can perform full-scale procedures for checking multiple websites from more than 140 distributed locations around the world under different Internet service providers in different countries. So you can instantly know when, where and why your website is down.
Many different tools are available on this service for website diagnostics. The toolkit starts with basic ways to diagnose the availability of a website through various Internet protocols, page load speed tests, and certificate validation. And it ends with monitoring and managing advertising campaigns and server hardware diagnostics. And all of this can be tested within a month of registration.
To support all of the above and ensure that the webmaster is highly responsive, this system collects a large number of statistics. This makes it easy for the webmaster to track each problem and investigate it all the way back to the source. Even if these problems occurred a long time ago – the check logs are stored for a long time and can be easily exported to a file in a suitable format.
Advanced tools for automated monitoring
To facilitate the monitoring of websites even more, this service offers an advanced toolkit. The toolkit includes a tool for checking the integrity of data on web pages – Snapshot. It is an easy-to-use tool that lives up to its name. With it, the webmaster can create a snapshot of the reference version of the web page. The system will compare against this snapshot over time and report changes, missing data, or problems that arise.
In addition to advanced website monitoring techniques, HostTracker has a customizable monitoring system. This allows you to know the status of the website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The system sends a message via one of the messengers, from Skype to Telegram, when it detects problems with the website. And if the webmaster is unavailable, the system can even send an SMS or audio message. At the same time, the webmaster has a wide range of notification settings.
