The short answer would be that uptime monitoring is the process of monitoring the uptime of your websites and servers using a third-party uptime monitoring tool. These tools will periodically access your website or ping your server to make sure that they are up and running correctly. Whenever they are found to be down or not functioning properly, you will be notified of the outage so you can take immediate action. The end goal will be to have your uptime as close to 100% as possible; the higher the better.
Who should monitor their uptime?
Anyone with a web presence. It’s in your best interest to have your website online as much as possible, so you won’t miss out on paid or organic traffic. If your website suffers from frequent downtimes, you can lose visitors, you can lose income, you can waste money on paid advertising and promotions, and you can have your website rank lower on search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.
So, no matter if your website is selling a product or it’s just a blog where you have ads on, you should always monitor your uptime to make sure your website is always online and functioning properly.
Why is it important to monitor my uptime?
Let’s say that you have a website that sells shoes, and you invest money in advertising and promotional campaigns on social media. Without constantly monitoring your website’s uptime, your website may suffer outages (sometimes short, for a few minutes, while sometimes even hour-long outages), and you would not even be aware of it. Your users would simply see the website load up very slowly or timeout completely, and they would just move on to the next business in search of shoes. This will result in wasted money on one end, from your advertising and promotional campaigns, and lost revenew on the other end by not making any sales while the website is down, plus a hit of your overall reputation, as the users are unlikely to return if they’ve had a bad experience in the first place. So, you’d end up bleeding money for ads/promotions, losing revenue in lost sales, and losing reputation, a three-in-one devastating combination, just because you did not monitor your uptime.
Using the uptime monitoring data can also be very useful for you to know when it’s time to change web hosting providers. If your current provider is not offering you a satisfactory uptime, it’s always a good idea to look for better options elsewhere.
Won’t my hosting provider just tell me if they’re suffering an outage?
No, in absolutely most cases, the hosting providers will not even acknowledge they are having issues unless the outage is becoming very large, affecting a wide range of their users, and lasting very long. Even then, in most cases, there would just be a post about it on their status page, but you would most likely not be notified directly, or you would only be notified with a summary of the incident post-mortem, which is way too late to do anything about it anyway.
No web hosting provider will ever notify you of small, even if frequent, outages that your website or server suffers. It is not in their interest to ever do such a thing, which is why third-party monitoring tools are always the best option, because they are an impartial third party that has no stake in whether or not your website has a good recorded uptime; while your web hosting provider has a clear bias in not having a bad uptime record.
Why should I use a “third-party” uptime monitoring tool?
The answer is simple, because if you were to host your own monitoring tool at the same place where your websites and servers are hosted, you may risk having your monitoring tool suffer from the same outage as your websites/servers, so you wouldn’t be notified of the downtime if the monitoring system itself is also down.
Should I use multiple uptime monitoring services?
Absolutely. You should never rely on just one uptime monitoring service, ever. Nowadays, there are more than enough free uptime monitoring services out there that you can pick from. Use multiple of these services to see which ones work best for you. In some cases, some of them will even yield different results, false positives, and such, so you should make sure that you have multiple uptime monitoring sources to have a clear picture of whether an outage really happened or not.
Conclusion
If you have any online presence, be it an e-commerce website, a blog, or an app, you should be monitoring the uptime of your website and the uptime of the server(s) running your website. With plenty of free uptime monitoring options available out there, you can even do so without spending any money, if your infrastructure is not too big; you can always start small and grow as you need to.
Start uptime monitoring your websites and servers today to be aware of outages you may have never known about.