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The Basic Facts About Service Level Agreements

How much will it cost if a website receives a large influx of traffic and exceeds its data transfer allowance? If there is a catastrophic event and a website or server is inaccessible or hardware damaged beyond recovery, what compensation, if any, will the web hosting service provide? Customers are often unaware that many of answers they seek are located in the service level agreement (SLA).

A SLA is part of a legal contract for services between a service provider and a customer. A web hosting SLA formally defines what a web hosting service will be provide, when and how long the service will last, as well as remedies and exceptions to the agreement. Many of the provisions are technical specifications that allow objective measurements to ensure compliance by the web host and prevent conflicts with its customers.
In an attempt to stand out from the numerous web hosting services in the market, web hosting SLAs often include strong guarantees. The level of guaranty a web host offers may differ depending on the contracted service, but most emphasize uptime, infrastructure and hardware reliability, and customer service quality.

Uptime is the percentage of time a server or website is accessible to customers, which is a very important measurement when deciding where to host a website. Generally, hardware entails the server and its individual components, and the facility the server is housed is the facility, which includes the power, HVAC, security, and other non-hardware essentials necessary to provide web hosting. Customer service guarantees may include promised response times for questions, technical problems, or requests for additional services.

The exclusions section of an SLA is very important because it outlines when the provisions in the SLA will not apply. In these scenarios, the web hosting provider will not be liable for any damages incurred by the customers. The exclusion section usually describes the most common scenarios when downtime may occur. In order to hold a web host accountable for the times when they are supposed to be liable, you may need to have an SLA Management system in place so you know when your website is up, and when it’s down. An attentive reading of the SLA may indicate what the most common forms of downtime are with a particular web hosting service. In the event of downtime, most SLAs provide compensation to the customer in the form of service credits for future usage, which generally cannot exceed the amount paid for the service and are not redeemable for cash.

What’s the Cost of Not Monitoring Your Websites?

Having a smooth operating website has perks and advantages. In fact, this provides a unique competitive advantage in the industry. A website that is not able to deliver its content at all or in a timely manner will cause website visitors to lose interest. Moreover, this would also mean that website owners are merely wasting their time and money in investing in the development of the website.

Losing Potential Customers to the Competitor

It is important to ensure that all the elements of a website are functioning properly. This, in return will ensure that the web investment of the company is maximized. If the company website fails, potential customers will likely be going for the competitor. Basically, having a website ensures that the customers are reached around the globe 24 hours a day ad 7 days a week. If the website is broken then it will not be able to fulfill its potential.

The Possibility of Losing Profits

It is very important that a website is accessible to users, visitors and customers. A website that is frequently inaccessible will result to the loss of profits for the business. Moreover, this will also destroy customer loyalty. Thus, it is best to hire services that can help with monitoring the uptime and downtime of a website.

Degradation of Your Brand

If you website is frequently down or there are issues with it, then you may be damaging your brand. Think about this for a moment; what if every time you went to visit a major brand’s website it was down about 50% of the time? You would begin to see that brand as unreliable, and this problem with their website would translate into other issues and problems with your reputation. In this day and age, customers associate your website closely with your overall reputation, and that’s something that you need to be aware of.

Loss of Communication with Customers

If your website is frequently down, this can mean that your email servers and other things associated with your site are down including comment forms and other ways for your customers to reach you. This means that your service levels fall, and you could have some seriously upset customers on your hands. In this day and age, people really do expect relatively instant communication, and if you aren’t responding to service requests, even for a little while, that can mean big problems for your business.

Does Website Performance Really Matter?

In the era of information technology, the first place people look to for information is the internet. When an individual types his or her search query into a search engine and is directed to your website, that individual is there for a reason. The website visitor may be looking to learn information about a particular topic, or he or she may want to know more about your about the services your business offer. Website visitors are fickle, they want to visit the site, learn what they need to learn, and then keep moving along. It doesn’t matter if your website is for a blog, local business, or an online store; website performance matters. It takes only seconds to lose a visitor’s attention, and possibly lose them forever.

As a web publisher, you need to be on top of this information, and continually monitor the speed and performance metrics of your site for fluctuations. If your site is running slow, then you’ll know and you can go ahead and make the necessary adjustments to bring it back to normal. There are a number of free and commercial monitoring services that you can use in order to accomplish this.

Always remember that website visitors are impatient; they want to visit your site, get what they need and leave the site. If your website is too slow, then visitors will get frustrated and leave. The speed of your website is important not only for your visitors but for you as well. If your website takes too long to load, then you miss out as a web publisher because visitors will not get acquainted with your website content. In addition, advertisers may not want to work with you if your website runs slowly, which can cause you to lose out on a potentially substantial amount of ad revenue.

Improving the speed and performance of your website does take work, but it is manageable. There are many ways you can boost the performance of your website such as using different domains for alternative types of content, firewall protection, cloud servers, multiple web servers, and many other techniques to increase speed. One of the first things that you should do when you’re setting out to improve your site’s speed, is get a baseline by running a website speed test. This will help give you an idea about where you’re starting from, and some of the problem areas that you need to improve on your site. Again, tracking the performance metrics of your site is really the first step you need to take to increase its efficiency. As long as you’re proactive about monitoring your website metrics, and take steps to ensure your overall server and website health, you should be in good shape when it comes to performance.

Web Application Monitoring Services: Are They Worth the Money?

Since this blog focuses mostly on technical details, I wanted to take a minute to dive into the less technical aspects of website monitoring, and talk about the more basic, practical implications of monitoring (or not monitoring) your website. The truth of the matter is that even if you’re a part-time, hobbyist webmaster, you can still get a lot of benefit from monitoring our website and tracking details related to its performance.

Obviously, if you’re someone who makes money from your website (or websites) the value in monitoring is clear. If you have a shopping cart go down for a few hours on a website that’s making five figures a day, you know what that means; you’re losing money every second…literally. But what if you’re just a casual webmaster? What if you’re someone who doesn’t stand to lose thousands of dollars if their website is down? In that situation, I’d honestly argue that your website uptime and performance is equally important, it’s just that the measurement of value is different. For example, if you’re just a part time webmaster, you are most likely in the stage building a readership or following to your blog. If your site is continually down or slow, you can be sure that this reflects poorly on you and your brand. And you don’t need to be a large company to be a brand; you can be one person. Think of it this way: your website is a reflection and extension of you, it’s like your business card, storefront, first impression, and everything else you can think of combined. If it looks bad, is down, or loads slow, you are likely to lose new subscribers fast! This is especially true if you have a website where you’ve got a shopping cart running, or something similar where you’re dealing with people’s money. There are a lot of different web application monitoring tools that you can use (covered a bit in the section below) in order to mitigate problems there, but the point is that you take the time to actually institute some sort of tracking to make sure that your site is performing as it should.

There are many studies that show just how short people’s patience is when it comes to website speed and loading times. So, when you think about all of this together, you can see why it’s important to know two things: 1) that your website is online, and 2) that your website is performing well. Without a way to measure these statistics, you are holding your site back from reaching its full potential.

So that raises the question then…how does someone go about monitoring these metrics? Well, there are a few ways, but the best and easiest way (not always the cheapest though) is to subscribe to a monthly service that performs these checks, and notifies you when something goes wrong. Each provider has different costs and offers a slightly different package, and many offer free trials so you can test out their services and see which one is the best fit for you. Dotcom-Monitor offers a trial run of their service on their website www.dotcom-monitor.com/web-application-monitoring-tools.aspx, and so does another popular company called Neustar At the end of the day, it’s important that you just get started monitoring somewhere, and with something, because if you don’t, you’re living in the dark ages of internet metrics, and possibly losing readers and or money in the process.

Five Ways to Avoid Downtime Issues

For small, medium, and large businesses, online uptime is a vital part of commerce. The buying habits of a broad range of corporate and individual consumers have changed. The widespread use of mobile device platforms by businesses and mobile devices by individuals has resulted in constant online access. Effective website functioning directly affects sales potential. Downtime means that while customers are searching and buying, a website performance issue prevents them from interacting with the site. The mission of management in the modern business model is to align IT processes with organizational goals.

First, one must maintain a responsive website. Consumer behavior has changed; due in part to increased mobile access to the internet, and patience may overall be shorter. If a site does not open promptly, a large number of visitors leave immediately. It is critical that the processing power allocated to the interface process an entry quickly and reliably. In effect, it is like knocking on a door and getting no answer.

Second, monitoring the homepage is the next logical step in avoiding difficulties. Malfunctions at the entryway can create an instant business failure. However, if the homepage functions well, one must then monitor transactions. Here, one seeks to detect a point at which interactions cut-off or transactions fail. The problem may be structural, something in the procedure, or it may be technical such as a system malfunction. This is a vital determination since it affects visitors who have decided to move forward towards completing a transaction.

Third, conduct a thorough system assessment. This can pinpoint problems susceptible to multiple causes. A general problem, such a periodic slow response time at checkout, can have an infinite number of causes. To narrow down problem areas and causes, it is necessary to monitor at different times and from various positions. Time of day monitoring can isolate load factors. Like traffic in and out of a city, there may be periods of high demand that cause delays for customers. Monitoring from various locations may also reveal difficulties as traffic routing can help or hinder customers in a given location. Sometimes, a narrowly confined situation can wrongly appear to be a general server failure.

A fourth and critical factor for examination is whether the system has adequate capacity. The amount of available disk drive space is critical. When a system operates near capacity, it may fail to perform certain functions. This is a simple but frequently overlooked factor.

Fifth, you should consider pinging your IP address to check the response time of ICMP packets to the web host. By running a ping test you will also see errors that occur during the ping process. This information can be extremely helpful in diagnosing lag issues with your host.

Finally, monitoring the host is a frequent path to discovering problems. The host’s service levels can prove inconsistent, and its problems unavoidably spread to the host’s system users. If you find that you’re having a large amount of problems with your host, it may be a good idea to consider switching hosts and signing up with a more reliable provider.