Website monitoring has turned into a must-have in the wonderful world of online commerce. Some individuals, however, may not see why website monitoring and server monitoring are so crucial in today's online era. In the era of ecommerce, what exactly happens to websites that do not have monitoring service in place? Here are several cautionary tales to help you understand why downtime is indeed dreaded among those in the know.
You Get a Call From Your Customer
You're having a "slow" day and opt to make use of the lull in web site traffic and orders and relax with a sit down elsewhere. After about one hour, the phone rings. It's a valued customer asking why your website isn't online. You're a little chagrined - as you had no idea. It looked like it was fine on your own end, but you didn't realize you were considering a cached version of your site and your site wasn't actually functioning. You assure your customer that you'll take care of the problem immediately, only to learn your website has been offline for a few hours and you had no idea. Just how many sales did you lose? Even worse, how many potential customers did you merely push away? If website monitoring had been in place, you'll have known concerning the downtime - when it occurred - and you wouldn't have had to possess to endure the embarrassment of a customer alerting you.
You START TO SEE a Drop in Sales
It's been proven that lots of consumers will simply leave a website and go to another, if page load times last a lot more than 3 seconds. You see a drop in sales, but attribute it to the economy or it simply being a "slow" time of year. The simple truth is - your page load times are becoming increasingly unacceptable, as your site's performance is declining and you also have no idea and soon you receive a scathing email from the would-be customer concerning the horrible performance of one's website. Who is to state how long your site was experiencing performance issues and just how many customers and sales were lost because of those issues? With website monitoring service in place, you never need to consider such questions.
Your Website Exceeds Its Allocated Bandwidth or Is Affected by Other Sites on a Shared Server
Your site suddenly falls because you exceeded your allocated bandwidth - and you may have seen it coming, had you seen the reduction in site performance that always precedes such situations or you could have been notified of the rapidly-increasing traffic, if you had only had website monitoring service set up. Worse yet, you may well be on an unlimited plan on a shared server and something of the other sites is hogging all the server's bandwidth, affecting the performance of your site. In either situation, you should have been notified of the problem by your site monitoring service instead of learning the hard way with decreased sales and lost profits.
It's No Laughing Matter
With regards to your site, lost customers and lost profits are no joke. You want to make sure to stay on top of any issues that make a difference your business's bottom line - particularly when it involves the uptime and performance of one's website. This is exactly why website monitoring service isn't an optional feature for serious ecommerce professionals. It's mandatory.