You understand that the up-time of one's website is essential. You have even come to the conclusion that a website monitoring service is crucial if you want to minimize the downtime your website experiences. What you don't know is the reason why you should purchase such a service whenever there are so many companies offering free website monitoring on the internet. Before you jump on the "free" service bandwagon, there are a few things you need to take into consideration.
Grandma Always Said There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
If you didn't hear it from your own grandmother you've likely heard it someplace else. There's no such thing as a free of charge lunch. The question you need to ask yourself is, if a company has something of value that they could sell at a profit, why would they just give it away for free? A lot of time, work, and investment get into quality website monitoring services and the free ones on offer aren't listed as nonprofit organizations, so how are they making their money? When you realize how these businesses make their money, you realize free isn't free after all.
Oftentimes santander.co.uk status monitoring service is a bare bones package a service will offer you to get you hooked. The theory is that as soon as you observe how vital the service is, but how much the "free" service is lacking, you'll upgrade to a paid service - usually at a higher price than had you started by buying paid service all along.
Not All Services ARE MANUFACTURED Equal
Now, let's say that you do find a website monitoring service that doesn't up-sell and the service is really free. The real thing. A free service with no strings attached. What you should ask yourself again is, why is the service free? The facts lacking? Or what is it adding? Will you or your website be bombarded with advertisements to support the funding of the service? Or simply the service is lacking in the features it includes, such as ways of communication. For example, a website monitoring service that only notifies you of website downtime via email isn't likely to do you much good if your email is down along with your site. You need a website monitoring service that will alert you via not only email, but text and phone calls to appropriate personnel aswell.
You also need to find out how often your site will be checked for downtime whenever considering any website monitoring service. Ideally you need your site checked every 60 seconds or less to ensure continuity of your site's up-time. If google.com status is only checked for downtime every hour, then your site could potentially be down a complete 59 minutes before you are even made alert to a downtime issue.
In addition, you want to ensure that the web site monitoring service you have has several server monitoring your site. If there is an electrical failure at one server location, there must be other server locations spread out to make certain your site's monitoring will not be interrupted.
When you are looking at free website monitoring solutions, the chances that a free service will provide your site with the comprehensive monitoring and level of technology needed to truly protect your website from downtime are slim to none. Since plus.net status monitoring services are mostly of the services that actually pay for themselves over time, searching for such a service based on price alone is never advisable. Rather than looking for something free, choose a service which will actually meet your site's needs and will monitor your website adequately.