Website Monitoring Service: How It Works

Although many companies offer website monitoring services these days, many webmasters still don't understand how website monitoring works. In this article we are going to discuss how and for whom monitoring does its job.

The idea of website monitoring is very simple: a provider's server pings your website with a pre-set frequency and checks the reply. If your server returns any other response than "200OK" status, the owner of a website gets immediately notified. Of course, this is a very simplified scheme. In reality, a website monitoring provider has servers on all continents to make sure, that your website is available throughout the world. Website uptime is only one parameter that is checked, others include but not limited to: server performance monitoring, dns/email and network infrastructure statuses, transaction and even VOIP server monitoring.

When it's detected that your website experiences troubles of any kind, you get informed immeditely or as you configure the service. Usual notification options are: sms, email, phone, IM or skype messages.

If you want to stress test your website to examine how it will behave under an influx of visitors, you need a web load stress test option. Not all website monitoring services offer this option, but quite a lot do. You will need to specify how many virtual concurrent visitors you would like to "visit" your site and for how much time the load stress testing should last. One the testing is over your will get a detailed statistics of your web server performance, but of course it's your main task to also monitor server resources and log every action on the server.