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.