Monitor the Uptime of Your Websites and Servers

Websites are nowadays used to do business and earn profit. If you belong to those who own such a website or just planning to start on-line business, you will have to monitor the uptime of your websites or servers. Do not let your clients to let you know about your downtime.

There are companies, which websites are essential for their business success, as they are generating the most or the whole of the company's revenue. Maybe also you belong to them. When this kind of website (server) is down, your business is affected. If your website is hosted by another company, you probably have some sort of "uptime" guarantee. Nevertheless, what exactly is uptime and how do you measure it. The basic definition of uptime is the period of time when your site is up and running, being accessible and able to satisfy customers.

The opposite, when your site is not accessible, it is down. And that is how you measure downtime. Faulty routers, malfunctioning LANs, or a loss of electrical power typically causes most of the downtimes; only rarely are caused by a natural disaster. Most often, it is caused by failures from the telecommunications company or an application failure, not a fire, flood or other catastrophe.

The cost of downtime calculation of course depends on many factors, like the products and services you provide, the size of your company, the number of online sales, etc. Even if you do not sell any products or services online, there is still a cost of downtime, but then in terms of damage of reputation etc. Calculate the cost of downtime is difficult and varies from one company to another. There is no "average business", so the statistics that quantify the cost of downtime for average businesses are not helpful.

The cost of downtime include direct costs such as the labor charges for a team of technologists who had to resolve the outages. The indirect costs are much more difficult to calculate and include potential lost revenue, reductions in worker productivity, damaged reputation with customers and in the marketplace, lost future sales and the cost of storing unsold goods. Financial analysts and accountants at your company can help you come up with the factors for your particular business.

If your website is generating profit for your business, you will for sure monitor it by an external monitoring service. The on-line market offers you to choose from different services to get uptime reports, statistics and get notifications as soon as your website is down. You can not let your customers to inform you about your own downtime.

To understand the importance of being aware of downtime, and to be alerted as soon as possible when a problem occurs, have a look at these numbers:
- According to a report by Cumulus Research Partners website downtime, caused by problems such as network failures, costs European businesses more than ? 5 billion a year.
- In the automotive industry downtime is often worth some $1.000 a minute.
- According to a recent study conducted by ARC Advisory Group, accounting for nearly five percent of total North American production, more than $20 billion is lost each year due to unscheduled downtime. Clearly, the traditional "fail and fix" approach to maintenance is no longer a viable MRO strategy.

Many hosting providers guarantee 99 % uptime. 99 % uptime sounds good, but means that your site could be down more than 3.5 days a year, and in today's Internet that is unacceptable. Comparing to that, 99.9 % uptime is much better, but with 8 hours and 45 minutes of possible downtime do not have to be always enough. The table below shows the percentage of uptime and the related downtime per year.

99 % ........ 87 hours, 36 minutes (more than 3.5 days)
99.9 % ...... 8 hours, 45 minutes, 36 seconds
99.99 % ..... 52 minutes, 33.6 seconds
99.999 % .... 5 minutes, 15.36 seconds
99.9999 % ... 31.68 seconds

As you can see, a 99 % uptime may not sound too bad, but it can cost you quite a lot of loss in revenues.

There are more than 30 uptime monitoring websites worldwide, while some of those have also affiliate partners. Among those are: Alertra, AlertSite, Dotcom monitor, InternetSeer, Jaguard, RedAlert, SiteUptime, WatchMouse, WebsitePulse and others. Almost all of them offer some prepaid packages based on monthly fees, varying by number of possible monitored sites (servers), additional services and by the complexity of the service. The price of their basic prepaid package is $5 - $40 per month. For this price you can monitor only 1, or maximum of 3 devices, choose from quite a lot of protocols, allow to send notifications to multiple contacts via e-mail, IM, pager or SMS, allow to choose between daily, weekly, or monthly reports by email and of course uptime performance and statistics available on-line. The Professional packages can go up to $180 per month or even higher.

There are just two completely free 24/7 monitoring services: Montastic and mon.itor.us.

Montastic's (http://www.montastic.com) biggest advantage is simplicity of the service, while it offers just basic service including real time monitoring and alerting by e-mail one contact person - the registred user, or by RSS feed, when the website is down and when it is back again. It allows to monitor only http websites, limited to the number of 100 (what is not a limit at all), checking it every 10 minutes from two different locations.

Meanwhile mon.itor.us (http://mon.itor.us) provides network, website and server monitoring service supporting 11 protocols with possibility to monitor unlimited number of devices and alert unlimited number of contact persons by e-mail, RSS feed, IM message, pager or SMS. There are also other remarkable features as personalized interactive interface, where you can add server performance and availability tests, set daily, weekly or monthly reports sent by e-mail. Tests are performed from 3 geographically distributed servers, and they are always adding more interesting features as they are still in beta version.

Peter Cernak works at Sourcio (http://www.sourcio.com). The company develops mon.itor.us and offers a wide range of IT services and Open Source solutions for small and medium-size businesses