Monitor the Uptime of Your Websites and Servers. Downtime is Expensive!

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 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 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. The company develops mon.itor.us and offers a wide range of IT services and Open Source solutions for small and medium-size businesses.

'Advantages of Building Dedicated Custom Server'

The robust power of performance, control, convenience and flexibility.

The variety is greater, best data management, speedy, gaming, and able to handle higher volume traffic web sites, free set up, bonuses such as Google? ad word credits, bandwidth protection and choice.

Not like shared web hosting which is one single server shared with very many sites and greater security could be riskier. Most likely the IP address is not dedicated unless, deciding to pay extra amount. This may depend upon the host provider. The other web sites are on the same block with your IP mostly. The hard drive is partioned so, many sites can be hosted. The results slower download speeds and most definitely if the web page/s or site is not HTML optimized before or during uploading to the shared hosting server.

The custom dedicated hosting server is an extraordinary piece of computer technological equipment. Its established use is going beyond the scope of ordinary. The individuals or businesses and organizations can load all site/s to the hosting computer with respect too the content that the host may allow. In addition manage all sites with one CP - (Control Panel).

The custom server is built per your specifications, the inside of the box as we say, in the internet hosting service business. And this will depend on the provider and what they may offer. The Operating System (OS) such as, Linux? Red Hat Fedora 4, or recently Enterprise Edition, Windows? Web or Standard 2003 Edition. The hard drive (storage) such as single or dual 120GB+ with a mirroring affect called RAID. This is great for back up or disk health becomes not so healthy.

The bandwidth is the amount in measurement K, KB, MB, GB or TB transferable pages or web site information that is downloaded - stream as we say, in the field. This can be increased with increment amounts and varies as well. No bandwidth overage with protection.

The RAM or Radium - Ram bus Access Memory type processor single or duo with hyper treading - (HT?) technology is very important with GHz of 3.0 or more. This enables the speed of reading and writing and opening more rapidly

Control Panel none or can manage many different domain names from 30 - Unlimited amount with types like Plesk?, cPanel? and Virtuzzo? that it's powered by with performance and reliability. Each site can be administered the disk quotes and bandwidth needs and add with respect to the hosting business any application - (software) options like My SQL? for dynamics within means along with all the basic panel technical functions.

The extras of FTP - (File Transfer Protocol) for back up. This varies can be matched to the hard disc amount storage space.

The external hardware appliance firewall protection advancement to guard against hacks, viruses, disastrous harvesting worms and other on line threats.

With the advanced technology of custom dedicated servers being so quick and powerful all can be done with several clicks of the mouse?

*By electing to place a link on your Web site and the use you acknowledge and agree that you have no right to modify, change or alter in any way the trademarks and other intellectual property, including, but not limited to, the link to this site. Any modification, change, alteration or similar action shall result in termination of the right to place such link on your Web site. You also acknowledge and agree that you will NOT associate this with any illegal site/s or of any adult nature in any way and/or have no right to use any of this site's intellectual property except as contained in the links provided above. The right to place a link to this Web site may be terminated or revoked for any reason whatsoever. 101Domainames.com 101Domainames.com is the complete full service premier internet products and service provider for Low Cost Domain Names to Affordable Web Hosting & More. In addition to helping New or Professionals to get their personal and/or businesses online, 101Domainames.com provides up to date information, tips, news, promotions, products, services & More via site and web log throughout The USA & Internationally