The choice of your web hosting is essential to ensure the performance of your website, but also and above all its availability at all times. Indeed, in a perfect digital world, a website is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round.
But in reality, ensuring website availability 100% of the time is a big challenge for web hosts, the guarantee of continuous uptime is low. This is why it is important for you, a client of a web host and owner of a website, to monitor your site.
After the completion of your website creation project, you must therefore monitor the availability of your web platform. In this article, I offer you 4 tools that you absolutely must know to monitor your site, without being stuck in front of your screen.
Website monitoring: how it works
When your website is unavailable, you risk losing a conversion, and a turnover. To stay alert, it is imperative that you perform website monitoring, to ensure that your site is available in real time.
A monitoring tool allows you to perform a test on the online availability of your website and all of your web pages, thus ensuring the interactions of your users. But monitoring also involves testing the performance of your server, as well as the performance of your network, SSL certificates, and DNS records.
When the uptime monitoring tool detects an error on one of the availabilities that may affect the site, an alert is sent to the technical team of the website. If you use a powerful tool, it is able to give a diagnosis on the error, which allows the technical team to solve the problem in record time. Some monitoring tools can produce powerful graphs, which trace the site’s uptime history over a period of time, allowing you to track any issues.
The 4 website monitoring tools
To monitor the real-time availability of your website and your server, you can buy your uptime monitoring tool, create your own software, or hire the SEO services of a professional specializing in website monitoring.
In any case, if you decide to use a website monitoring tool, know that you can find more than a dozen online. There is something for every budget. Indeed, you can find a free uptime monitoring tool, as you can find one that can cost you several thousand dollars for an annual subscription.
Indeed, the price of website monitoring tools varies according to the features available on the tool. The less expensive tools are only able to run http checks to make sure your site is loading properly. The more powerful, more expensive tools can perform more complex tests on several points of control, in order to ensure better monitoring of any anomalies.
http monitor
“Http” is the acronym for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, literally translated into French as Hypertext Exchange Protocol. It constitutes the data exchange key between the Internet user and a server. Concretely, typing keywords on a search engine sends a query by doing the keyword research service. Thanks to the http protocol, the request is sent to the server, which, after analyzing this request, will send the responses of the request, which are in particular the information souserght by the Internet user.
The http monitor therefore aims to verify that the exchange between the Internet user and your server is carried out without anomalies. It therefore makes it possible to analyze the http traffic of your website, and therefore its availability.
Thanks to the advanced parameters of the http monitor, it is also possible to check, for example, the establishment of an SSL certificate.
TCP port monitor
TCP, an acronym for Transmission Control Protocol, is the protocol that will transfer a data packet between two network devices. This protocol notably uses a data retransmission strategy in order to avoid any loss of data during their transmission.
The TCP port monitor immediately notifies the user, in case a transmission failure has occurred, or if there was any problem while transmitting information.
Ping Monitor
The ping is the acronym for Packet internet Grouper, which is a method that measures the latency or the time it takes to send and receive a packet of data between two machines, therefore between the Internet user’s computer and your website server. It allows in particular to evaluate the connection speed on a network, which represents an important factor on the accessibility of your website, but also on your referencing.
The Ping monitor allows you to perform uptime monitoring of your site, thanks in particular to the Ping that it sends to your website. When an anomaly or failure is detected, the Ping Monitor quickly notifies you, identifying the missing connection.
This uptime monitoring tool for your website not only allows you to confirm that your platform is operational, but also gives you statistics on the downtime of your site, as well as the connection speed of your network.
DNS Server Monitor
DNS, acronym for Domain Name System, is the protocol that allows the browser to translate the online address typed by Internet users into a numerical address, equivalent to the IP address of the corresponding server.
The DNS server monitor monitors addresses and matches the information exchanged, and thus allows you to have important and detailed information about the availability of your site, and warns you when your server encounters a network failure, a failure of protocols, etc. DNS Server Monitor also detects problems and notifies you when a numeric address and the online address the user is looking for do not match.
In short, these 4 monitoring tools allow you to monitor uptime the availability of your website in order to help you solve the problem quickly in the event of a breakdown or unavailability. Threats to the digital world can knock on your door at any time, potentially costing you revenue. You must therefore anticipate these threats, by choosing an excellent host for your site and monitor your server using these tools. You can also use site monitoring software to increase the performance of your website monitoring.
