Free Vs Paid Website Monitoring Service - What Startups Need?

For web-based startups investing in web monitoring services appears as a unneeded expense at first look. A startup cannot keep giving bad user experience to new visitors and their precious existing customers. You cannot manually keep an eye for 24 hours on their website. Even if it is possible, you may not get a comprehensive or accurate report. Since if you open your site too often, the browser stores the web pages in the cache and fetches it from there when you open the site. Further, the user experience with your website may be completely different when users try to access your site from different parts around the world. For all the reasons above it is better to use a website monitoring service.

Benefits of Site Monitoring Services

The site monitoring service helps a startup to deliver a superior and consistent user experience to their website visitors. As soon as you launch your site there should be a monitoring process to support success of the startup. You also need to discover any site issue before your users discover them. Otherwise, your visitors have a bad user experience and it prevents any good word of mouth and repeat visitors to your site. The startup may never gain traction with their potential customer base.

Free Vs Paid Website Monitoring Service

There are many free tools to monitor your site’s uptime. Some provide free trials while others provide a free service. But are they suitable?

Most of the paid tools also have a free option typically with limited features or full featured free trial versions. As long as you are using the trial version to evaluate the feature set, performance of the tool in real conditions and it’s suitability for your business process, it is okay. But, in the long run free tools don’t adequate support your business needs and may compromise the success of your startup. The reports that you will fetch using free software may lack sufficient insights, may monitor your site less frequently and not provide key inputs that help to recover quickly from a downtime. If you examine the matter in further detail the disadvantages of a free monitoring service become obvious.

Restricted Reports With Free Solutions

From the analysis report of free tools you get to know about the uptime, but nothing beyond it. To know about the performance metrics you have to opt for premium versions. Apart from uptime monitoring, some of the metrics that you can expect from a paid service are- page speed monitoring, real user monitoring, synthetic interaction testing, root cause analysis, multiple user login, server performance and reliable alert system. In short, along with the information about your website availability you will get an insight about your website performance which is effective to outsmart competition.

Benefits from Time Spent With Free Tools is Inadequate

You need to invest enough time to install, configure and maintain even a free solution. So you need to think if it is worth delineating so much time to receive only an outline report and no in depth analysis. On the other hand, paid tools in order to justify their higher cost work hard to make it easy for the installation of the tool and maintain it and also regularly update their software for superior service.

Free Services May Not Help With Enhancing User Experience

Your aim is to deliver a better end user experience through your website. Availability of a site only cannot guarantee that. Users today love a fast website and smooth interaction. You need to understand their requirements and optimize your page for a better end-user experience. The free tool reports will not provide the data to help you to attain your user experience related business goals. You may need to opt for a paid monitoring service to enhance users’ experience with your website.

Conclusion – Free vs Paid Website Monitoring Service

Free tools are always attractive and one may suppose it is great to begin with when you have insufficient budget. However, the startups more than anything else need data to improve the quality of Users experience with their websites. The data acquired from free tools may not be that effective and reliable. They may have inaccurate and insufficient information on users experience with the website or the inefficiencies of the web processes on the website. Therefore, while planning budget, startups need to set aside a budget for better website monitoring software. This small step and budget could make a big difference for your startup.