The more time and money you invest in your start-up, the more important the question of reputation and trustworthiness is. There is a basic rule: your e-business must be accessible every second to every Internet user from all over the world. Downtime for any reason is completely unacceptable. And that’s why you should consider runnings website performance tests and signing up for a web site monitoring account.

Let’s see how website monitoring works. As I’ve already said, your website must be accessible every second to every Internet user. To ensure your site is available throughout the world, website monitoring services set up special servers, called Monitoring Agents, in data centers on all the continents (excluding Antarctica ). The monitoring agents check your web server with a set frequency. Quite a lot of stuff can be monitored: HTTP/HTTPS servers, FTP, POP3/SMTP, IMAP, DNS, ICMP, UDP, video streaming servers and much more. If one or more monitoring agents report downtime, an alert message for the webmaster is generated. Currently, notification options include:

• email
• regular and cell phones
• sms
• fax
• pagers
• …

Most advanced website monitoring services are capable of doing multi-step actions: for example, monitoring agents can login to your clients’ zone, choose a DVD in your online-store, then go to the shopping cart and “buy” it, ensuring availability of all the payment steps for an ordinary customer.

Today web site monitoring companies offer a wide range of services. The pricing also varies greatly. Here on fastmonitoring.com I’ll try to provide as much info as possible to help you choose your web site monitoring service.