Solutions to errors » SaaS Providers and Uptime Monitoring

Monitoring website uptime is something most website owners do. There are several options available for website monitoring, from ad-supported newsletters to powerful solutions that ping your website’s URL every minute and generate impressive reports. The right solution for you depends on both your needs and budget.

That being said, many websites can be down often, and for a while, without causing major panic. As an example, if you’re an average blogger, reasonable downtime will probably not harm you very much. Same thing if you have a static website that mainly provides information. Visitors will either come back later or find elsewhere, that’s all.

Things are getting more critical when you have a transactional website and sell goods or services. In this case, downtime is likely to make you lose sales. Those who got a 404 error on your website’s shopping cart are very likely to develop negative sentiment towards your organization. Unfortunately, they may never come back, except for sending you negative feedback through your contact form.

Losing sales is no good. Losing customers who pay for a service on a recurrent basis is worse. Losing credibility marketwise is even worse. But, being held responsible for making your customers lose money is worst-case scenario. Actually, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers face this reality every day. They provide software that’s hosted on their servers and grant subscription-based access for a monthly or annual fee. Their clientele usually can’t afford downtime at all. As a customer, you lean on them to provide you with a reliable service so you can run your business successfully.

CRM, project management, accounting and other business-oriented SaaS must be up as constantly as possible. Several potential customers ask for uptime reports to check whether a company offers a stable service. Hence, as a SaaS provider, you ought to choose a monitoring tool that empowers you to generate user-friendly reports for both your staff and customers. Those reports are often requested in a “request for proposal” (RFP). Being able to provide comprehensive uptime reports is a competitive edge, as not all your competitors can fulfill this request. Some customers will be fine with a simple answer to the “What is your uptime percentage?” question. However, if you deal with large organizations, they are very likely to ask for tangible information. If you can’t provide the information they ask for, you may lose sales.

A good website monitoring software can help you in this matter. Moreover, if you have full access to the infrastructure where your website is hosted (e.g. dedicated hosting) or own it, a server monitoring software is probably a better match. Server monitoring software is usually more hardware-oriented (e.g. monitor CPU, temperature, RAM, hard drive space, etc.) while website monitoring software focuses on the website’s uptime mainly (sufficient is you’re on shared hosting, for instance).

Find website monitoring software at: http://www.activitymonitoringsoftware.com/website_monitoring/website_monitoring1.php

Find server monitoring software at http://www.activitymonitoringsoftware.com/network_server_monitoring/network_server_monitoring1.php