Web Server Monitoring Keeps Clients Keen
| July 9th, 2009Web server monitoring is a crucial aspect of online business. In today’s world, many standard brick-and-mortar places are starting to develop online presences; as they do, they discover that while it may be easy to put a web site in place, it can be tough to monitor exactly what’s happening with that website. Whereas in their store down on Thirty-Second Street, they have an administrative assistant always ready to help customers, on their website hosted somewhere in the ether, they have no admin: just a server. If that server starts to get buggy, problems with business can ensue.
Many people think of web server monitoring and website monitoring as a simple way to prevent issues from cropping up that would cause the server to crash. While that is an important function of such monitoring, an equally important (and sometimes overlooked) aspect of these monitoring services is their ability to notice an underperforming server. Sometimes it may be as simple as dust in the exhaust fan. Sometimes it might have been a buggy reboot. It could be anything, really, but if your server slows down, your customer slows down. And in an age when customers want speed above almost all else, that can be disastrous.
Customers drift away from websites that don’t load properly. If they are working through a transaction and they get the dreaded hourglass or the never-quite-loaded green bar down in the corner of their browser, they might just give up, close out, and move on. It’s a wonderful benefit of the World Wide Web that information can be accessed so swiftly. For a customer to run into a website that stops loading in time, it’s like cruising down the highway only to meet unexpected traffic. There’s nothing the customer can do; the customer gets frustrated, and, unless the business has a web server monitoring service in place, nobody’s the wiser. The customer simply drifts away to a site that can fulfill his or her needs.
And then the business wonders whatever happened to their profits.
Keen clients come from successful transactions. Remember the last time you bought something online, or worked through some research? Wasn’t it nice when everything went along smoothly? Web server monitoring ensures that whenever your website has an unexpected logjam, you will know about it. In fact, some web server monitoring providers don’t even need to notify you; if you buy the right service package from them, they’ll be the ones to see the glitch and they’ll be the ones to move in and fix it. Your client’s frustration will be almost at breaking point when, almost a world away, your monitoring provider’s technician flips the right switches and enters the right code and suddenly, your client’s connection is working again. Flawless, easy web surfing-that’s what website monitoring should do.
Let’s expand that into a full hypothetical situation. Online booksellers are a very popular alternative to the brick-and-mortar businesses we mentioned before. But online booksellers only work when their checkout services run smoothly. If a customer suddenly tips their digital shopping cart after running it over a digital bump in the road and spills their digital cash and consumer goods all over the digital shopping center, that customer is going to complain!
Not everything will run perfectly all of the time, but most things can run extremely well most of the time. Web server monitoring ensures that during the down times-even if it’s just slowing down and not crashing down-somebody has got your back. By keeping your servers running smoothly, you keep your customers appreciative and always coming back.
