Downtime on websites is becoming a far more widespread problem for site owners that ever before. Coupled with the increasing amount of e-commerce shopping websites, how do you know your customers have not already visited your website and moved on because of a website unavailability problem?
Every day, thousands of small ecommerce websites like yours drop offline and stay down for hours … even days before someone realizes what has happened! Your site probably goes down periodically and you don’t even know it.
Your website is your business as long as customers can reach it. Even if your website is up 99% of the time, this translates into over 7 hours per month where your customers cannot reach you.

Using a website monitoring service to ensure that your site is available 24hrs a day 7 days a week can save you much headache as well as increasing your chances of a sale.

Free Web Monitoring provides web site monitoring to webmasters and site owners absolutely free. Monitor your web site’s availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with instant email alerts and weekly web site performance.

Site24×7 is the easier, faster and more effective way to monitor the uptime and performance of your websites, online services and servers.

SiteUptime is a website monitoring service that checks your website at regular intervals and notifies you via email or SMS if it becomes unavailable. Multiple monitoring servers around the world run protocol based tests on your website at specific intervals (every 2, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes) 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year to ensure that your customers and users can reach your website. If more than one location detects a connection failure, an email or SMS alert is sent to you.

InternetSeer monitoring systems remotely check your website from several geographic monitoring stations at selected intervals. If the monitoring system is unable to reach the site, an email, cell phone or pager alert is sent to notify you of the problem. Some of the key web site monitoring services available include,
Availability Monitoring, Performance Monitoring, Link and Image Checking, Transaction Monitoring and Historical and Detailed Check and Alert Reporting

ServiceUptime is free remote website uptime monitoring designed to help you detect website downtime which can mean lost revenue and profits. The worst thing is users may never return to your website again if they experience difficulties opening your website. Register for free monitoring account and take control over downtime.Whenever your website becomes inaccessible or returns incorrect data the ServiceUptime alerts you within seconds of the event via email or SMS. Be notified instantly once your site becomes inaccessible!

 Some more sites that provide this service are:

• KillerSites.com
• e-Biz Monitor
• Host-Tracker.com
• Montastic.com
• Hyperspin.com
• CheckWebsite.org

 It is vitally important that your web site is in full working order at all times. Potential customers who cannot view your product/services or gain access to information because of errors or faults will quickly go elsewhere taking with them a bad impression of your Company. Losing a potential customer is bad enough but for them to leave with a poor impression of your Company is even worse.

So why do you need a Website Monitoring service?
Basically you need to know when your website is available and when it is not. By monitoring the situation you will have a clear picture of how your customers view your website. You need to know how long it takes your Web server to respond to requests and also be informed when major errors are encountered, such as pages not found, servers not responding, or Internet routing errors. Being notified that your site is unavailable to your customers – as seen from the Internet – allows you to begin troubleshooting before your irate customers call you.

A site that is frequently inaccessible is likely to lose you business and customers. A web server and web site which is easily accessible and responsive can only increase business for your Company. This is where website monitoring informs you where your server or web site problems lie.

Why Monitor a website for availability?
You may say that your web site has been designed by professionals and will not be subject to problems. There are many companies and some very big corporations who would have agreed with you until the problem hit them, now they know to their cost how damaging it can be not to have your web at 100% performance.

Many Companies are now using website monitoring to monitor their web sites. If you too are serious about your web presence then you need to look after your web site and, rest assured, if anything untoward goes wrong with your web site you’ll be the first to know and not a disgruntled visitor.

So what kind of errors can happen to website?
There are quite a number of things that cause web sites to have errors, some are listed below

    Web Server Failure Web Server Failure
    Faulty or inadequate programming code Faulty or inadequate programming code
    Malicious attacks and hackers Malicious attacks and hackers
    Unexpected user requests Unexpected user requests
    Viruses Viruses
    Navigation Errors Navigation Errors

These are just a few of the causes that can stop your web site from functioning correctly.

People often check out a firm or Company’s web site before making a decision to buy. It is therefore very important that a website is functioning correctly and the potential customer is not left with a bad impression of a business because of a fault. Even a minor error on a website could be damaging. Why spend time and money having a web site designed only to find out that your web site has been ‘down’ and unavailable.

If you don’t check your site frequently, how do you find out if everything is working as it should be? If you are busy, the temptation is to assume that all will be OK. After all, you’ve probably paid a professional website designer to do your Company’s site, so you might be forgiven for thinking nothing can go wrong. Unfortunately this is not the case. Websites need maintaining to keep them operating as intended. Things do go wrong and most probably will, just when you are least expecting it and you can’t blame the website designer in this case!

You are probably saying, "visitors can’t expect a web site to be operational 100% of the time", and that’s probably true. There are options to guard against websites that are unavailable for whatever reason. One way is to have a back-up site on another server and if your main site is down then visitors are redirected to your back-up site. However, this option is expensive. The best way of protecting your investment and customers and visitors is to have your website up and running and working correctly. The way to do this is by knowing immediately if your website has a problem so the matter can be speedily dealt with.

Reference Source: http://www.stevedawson.com/article0009.php