One of the most embarrassing events to happen to me is when my boss has asked me why our company website is down. I didn’t know it was down – and it was. Yellow Pages down the pants-time.
One easy way I found to get to know first is to use a website monitoring tool. I’ve used several different vendors in the past, some at sky-high prices, some for free. And to be honest with you, there ain’t much difference between them for the basic checking, but for your reporting and alerting, it’s worth spending that little bit extra.
If you’ve ever been embarrassed like this, or you could be, then you must act now. Don’t feel the ‘gaze of death’ when your boss looks you in the eye to find when this happens!
I’ve looked around the market and have found one vendor that I think offers an outstanding service – ObservePoint. And even better, they offer a free service so it’s risk-free to start with. Even if you already use a vendor for checking the health of your website, take a look at ObservePoint and see how they compare.
What I like about ObservePoint is that you can apply service levels to your website so you have an instant view if you’re meeting them – you don’t need to work it out for yourself. And of course, I can see when my site is down on my Blackberry, instantly (or by my cellphone).
Oh, and of course, you can monitor your competitors websites too. If you’re boss is giving you heat about an outage, then maybe showing your boss how your customers experience outages too will put the issue into context?
So take action now and get your site monitored by ObservePoint!
