Hold Your Web Host Accountable with Website Monitoring Services

If you’ve ever shopped for or purchased website hosting services, chances are that you’ve seen a number of hosts, including the one you pay each month or year, claiming an uptime rate of 99.9 percent. The question is, are they really delivering on that promise? When it comes to something as serious as the hosting of your website, you need to be in a position to hold your hosting company accountable. The only effective way to do that is with a quality website monitoring service.

The Stories Are Always Similar It’s a common occurrence. An entrepreneur or webmaster signs up with a leading hosting company, entrusting the uptime of their website to this company. After starting with the company, the customer is very happy with the service. However, over time it becomes apparent that the uptime the customer’s site is actually experiencing is a lot less than the 99.9 percent that was promised and guaranteed during signup. The problem is, the customer has no real way to know exactly how much downtime the site is experiencing and can’t give numbers to the hosting company when filing a complaint because they do not have website monitoring in place on the website.

Know Just How Much Downtime Your Site Is Encountering The only way to hold your hosting company accountable when it comes to the amount of website downtime your site is experiencing is to employ a quality website monitoring service to monitor your site. These services will monitor your site for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The moment your site goes down, the company will notify you via a variety of contact methods. Exactly how quickly you are notified and how you are notified will depend on the quality of the website monitoring service you choose.

Hold Your Web Host Accountable At the end of the month you can go through the downtime reports and information obtained from your website monitoring service. If it is significantly different from the amount of uptime your hosting provider promised you when you signed up for service, you need to contact the provider with the necessary information including how much downtime your site experienced and when the downtime occurred. Your goal is to determine exactly why your site went down and prevent it from happening again. If your web host doesn’t have a good explanation for the downtime or solutions to prevent it from happening in the future, it’s time to change hosting providers.

Also make sure that you get a refund for any downtime that exceeded the host’s downtime guarantee. While it may not add up to a lot, if all of the hosting company’s customers practiced this, the hosting companies would likely begin to take downtime more seriously as it would begin to affect their bottom line significantly.

Find a Quality Website Monitoring Service Remember, the only way you can hold your hosting company accountable is to have the numbers and data you need ready when you call them, and that means partnering with a quality website monitoring service that will provide you with the data you will need when you call the hosting provider to discuss the unacceptable downtime levels with them.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. Alertra's website monitoring cost is monthly and starts at USD $0.20 (20 cents) per URL for 60 minute monitoring. It will provide timely alert notifications and access to detailed reporting. Since April, 2000, Alertra provided website monitor services to more than 10,000 businesses and other organizations.Alertra's website monitoring costwebsite monitor