Today every business, even a small startup, has its own website – without accessibility to users online in today’s world, no company can survive. In this case, even a small private company website should be as informative as possible, filled with useful content and, most importantly, should work consistently. And both website’s rating in search engines and simply the attitude of users depend on it directly. To provide a proper website stability monitoring, a website owner usually hires the webmaster, whose task is to provide all of the above.
Proper approach to website monitoring
At its core, website monitoring is a set of regular checks of a website or other object accessible from the network to immediately detect emerging problems. These checks can be performed using different protocols: HTTP (and HTTPs), ICMP (ping), TCP (ports), etc. It is worth noting that there are different approaches to monitoring.
One way to monitor a website is through internal monitoring. In this case the software hosted on the same server as the website itself will evaluate it. Conventionally speaking, this includes tools such as Google Analytics. They relay information about customers who have visited the website and allow indirect conclusions about the website’s performance.
Another type of monitoring is external, or third-party monitoring. It is embodied in the imitation of real users entering with real addresses to the website, and makes conclusions based on real server responses to requests sent. These services are completely independent of each other and of the internal structure of the system. All they do is get the list of websites to check from the main server and give it the results.
Effective round-the-clock external monitoring
One of the best ways to provide the most effective external website monitoring is to use an automated system such as HostTracker. This platform runs regular tests at webmaster-specified intervals, starting at one minute intervals. When it comes to testing, the server sends a task to one randomly selected agent, part of the system’s external network.
If the response is positive, nothing happens, only a record in the database about it remains. It is available to the client as a test log. If an error has been seen, then immediately tasks are created to test this website by other randomly selected servers.
Then the HostTracker system will analyze all responses from all servers. If the system confirms error, it will be noted in logs and there is no reason to worry. If most or all of the agents have acknowledged the error, the system marks it as a serious problem. And the system records its code in logs. Webmaster can use this data later to identify the cause of the error.
It is likely that many users will not be able to get to the website at this time. And if you want to know about that instantly, you can register a communication method to receive alerts. Ths system can send notifications to different people, with different contacts and at any time. Moreover, you can set a time interval during which the system can send notifications. That way, HostTracker won’t bother that person at other times.
