Your website may be hosted in the world's best data center or in a supercloud, but you won't avoid outages. (Not even Amazon, Facebook, or Google do.) There are simply too many factors causing failures, such as hardware, software, human errors, or third-party actions.

If you're still hesitating about using website monitoring because you really don't see the point of it, I have 10 reasons for you that should leave no doubt.

1. You will always be the first person to know about your website being down

Who or what would you choose to tell you your site is down?

• An angry customer on the phone
• Your boss suddenly visiting you at your desk
• An email or SMS from a monitoring system

Exactly.

However, when using website monitoring, you will receive an alert the moment a failure is detected. (It will be dispatched in 60 seconds maximum from the time the failure occurs, as this is the monitoring frequency.) You might not manage to react that swiftly, but at least you won't be surprised.

2. You will minimize downtime and its consequences

The sooner you learn about a failure, the quicker you can react and make sure it is resolved. Moreover, the downtime is shorter.

Every minute of your website acting faulty means specific consequences. Those include lost leads (or even sales in the case of e-commerce websites), media contacts, job inquiries, potential partners, not handled customers, not displayed ads, and so forth.

3. You will verify the quality of your hosting provider's services

Don't rely solely on your hosting provider or web agency that looks after your website.

First, not every failure is a failure, according to the provider or agency. For example, if a server is working properly, a website that doesn't display the way it should is not a failure for a Web-hosting company.

Second, providers don't really care about informing their clients about every single downtime, especially in the case of Service Level Agreements (SLA) specifying penalties for not reaching agreed uptime levels (commonly 99.8-99.9%).

It's good to be able to verify uptime reports delivered by a hosting provider.

When using a website-monitoring service, however, you can set your subcontractors as additional alert recipients—and shorten the reaction time even more.

4. You will prevent your campaign budget from being wasted

Outage consequences are the most severe during advertising activities. Every visit on your website generated by a campaign is a user from a defined target group (your potential customer) and therefore, a measurable cost. If potential customers land on a website that is down, you're losing money.

Another result of a website failure is the negative effect on your brand image. A disappointed visitor might never come back to your website again.

If you run a popular site and offer advertising on it, your customers' campaigns are not displaying during a downtime. And that's time during which you also lose money—because you will have to deliver not displayed banner impressions anyway.

Therefore, any advertising activity on your website makes the failure reaction time even more critical.

5. You will keep an eye on your server's performance

There are situations where a failure can be predicted and prevented. One of them is a load (traffic volume) exceeding server capabilities.

A growing server response time is a sure signal informing you about a significant load increase. By configuring a limit of acceptable response time in a monitoring system, you can make sure that you will be alerted when it is exceeded.

You then will have time to react (upgrade the server) before your website goes down.