Importance of Monitoring Websites for Hacker Attacks

One possible reason for the website downtime could be the malicious attack by the hackers. Hacker attacks have become the growing threat for every business website both large and small. Sometimes, the attack could be huge that it may even take down the websites of big internet giants. Especially, if attack happens on the internet servers, it is typical that hundreds of websites will be taken offline for hours affecting the web traffic. One of the major attacks has happened last year in 2016, when hackers targeted the data centers of a domain name services company called Dyn. It has disrupted traffic to hundreds of websites including Twitter, Netflix, Paypal, the Financial Times, GitHub, disabling access to millions of users. With many such incidents occurring every year, it's no wonder that site owners are seeking alert services like website monitoring service for the protection of their websites. It is a wise option to employ preventive methods by having complete monitoring for websites such as uptime monitoring and performance monitoring, rather than implement corrective actions when such issues happen.

Ways That Hackers can Attack the Websites

There are many ways that hackers can plan to attack a website. Sometimes, they may exploit a system or network using latest technology or reuse the same method that has worked out for years. It can be as big as bringing down the entire network of user websites or may target a particular site for specific intention. From phishing scam to password hacking and fault injection of source code, hackers follow different tactics to hurt websites to bring them down. One such way is DDos or Distributed Denial of Services attack, where the hackers overwhelm the server or network with more traffic than it could deal with and sabotage the functionality of the website. This may eventually slow down the performance or totally shut down the website working. Having a flexible hosting plan with extended resources may help websites to handle the incoming volume of traffic to some extent, but cannot sustain if the server is attacked by too many requests.

Do You Need to Worry if You have a Small Website?

Hacker attacks are not only risks for websites, but also a threat for customer accounts, especially if the site is dealing with credit or debit card information. On contrary, sometimes hackers may not steal the personal data but may use the system as a tool to reach another system or network. So even a small website can become part of the hack to reach larger targets. As far as downtime is concerned, the affect would be frustrating for small business websites because the attack can significantly damage their business bottom line. Hence, it is essential even for small business site owners to put some preventive measures in place for their websites to minimize downtime risk and be prepared for the worst.

Use Monitoring Services to Minimize Downtime Risks

With website monitoring service, the site owners will know ahead of time if there is an interruption in website functionality. When a site is being constantly monitored, any discrepancy in site functionality will be known before the site actually goes down. The service would detect short or occasional downtimes or slow response times of the websites. As soon as an issue is detected, the site monitoring service would notify immediately. This helps to drill down and understand the reason for interruption, so the site owners can have an action plan in place to get things back to normal.