Why Tracking Uptime is Important for a Website?

An internet site, whether a personal blog or commercial e-commerce portal, has to be up and running for visitors and potential clients at any given point of time. Beyond focusing on minimizing downtimes, tracking uptime is also crucial to maintain an efficient and a well performing site. But sometimes things can go wrong at the hosting end due to various reasons making the site unavailable to the users. During downtimes the users will only see error messages when they try to access websites. Most often it is the web host's responsibility to monitor uptime and keep a check on the sites. However, as a site owner you cannot completely trust, sit back and relax thinking that they would take care of everything. Hosting companies doesn't suffer the loses to the same extent as your business does. So you have the obligation to track the uptime & site availability and get a clear view on provider's performance.

What is an Uptime Ratio?

The level of website availability which otherwise called uptime, is a critical metric that measures the performance of a web host. Hosting companies may guarantee they can deliver 100% uptime, but in reality it rarely happens due to some inefficiencies. These providers typically offer specific percentage uptime guarantee and make effort to reach those numbers regularly. If the specified uptime is not delivered they calculate downtime and return in the form of credit to the users account. But the credit the providers compensate is no where close to the losses that are incurred during downtime. There is no acceptable ratio for website uptime but people typically consider 99% as benchmark to get a minimal level of service. The more number of nines appear in uptime ratio, the better the service and lesser the downtime duration. Example : 99.999% of uptime is better than 99%.

Monitoring Website Uptime

Tracking uptime doesn't mean that you need to open and close the browser constantly to check the working of your site every five minutes. Neither it is a viable option nor it is possible to focus for 24 hours keeping aside all your important work. Technology has advanced remarkably and today there are many third party services available that can simplify this work for you. Monitoring uptime will let you identify the performance problems & site outages, so that you will have enough time to resolve these issues before they become critical. It also helps in analyzing how well the hosting provider is working towards keeping their uptime promises.

Use Monitoring Service for Measuring Uptime

There are indeed many tools available that can automatically check the website uptime and inform users about the site performance. But you cannot take chances compromising with low quality measuring tools as website uptime is critical for your business bottom-line. You need a good site monitoring service that can respond immediately in vital situations when site functionality is interrupted. Especially if you have a business the has no brick and mortar equivalent, and depends on the website availability for survival. In such instances, when issues happen, you would like to be the first one to know before visitors will notice. If quality uptime monitoring is not in place, it likely takes more time to realize & resolve the issues and bring the site back as active to the users.