Friday 22 February 2013

Website Monitoring Services – The Good, The Bad And The Ugly


Website Monitoring Services – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Website Monitoring Services – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Alertra

More and more website owners are realizing the importance of a website monitoring service in today’s ecommerce era. These services notify you immediately when your site goes down, checking availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is a task that must be done to ensure maximum website uptime, but it’s impossible for a website operator to do this themselves. Website monitoring services provide peace of mind for a small fee and most of the companies who use these services think of the service as an investment – an investment that definitely provides a return. The problem is that not all website monitors are created equal. How can you tell the good from the bad? Here are some tips to help.

What is the Method of Notification?

You see advertisements for free website monitoring services all over the place. The problem is that these “free” services only communicate with you via email. That’s a significant problem when you consider the fact that it’s not uncommon for your site’s email to go down when you experience a site outage. This means you aren’t even notified of the outage until your email is back up and running again – which means your site is back up and running with it. When every minute could mean lost profits, this method of communication isn’t sufficient. You need a website monitoring service that will not only provide you with email alerts, but will provide you with SMS text messages and phone calls as well. Only then will you know for sure that you will be notified the moment your site goes down and not after the problem has been resolved.

Where Are the Servers Located?

When it comes to the inequality of website monitoring services, the number of servers and location of the servers is a prime example. Let’s say your website monitoring service has only one server and the power goes out at the server location? Your website isn’t being protected until the power goes back on. In the case of a severe storm or outage, that could mean days. You need a website monitoring service that has multiple servers across various locations. The more servers and the more spread out they are, the better.

How Often Do They Check Your Site?

Another thing to look for is how often your website monitoring service checks or “pings” your site. If it’s only every 15 minutes, your site could technically go down for 15 minutes before you even realized it. Good website monitors can check your site every minute if you choose. Look for a website monitoring service that checks your site frequently so you won’t lose precious time during a website outage.

The Cheapest Isn’t Necessarily the Best:

There is indeed such a thing as a good deal, but remember that cheapest isn’t always best. You want a monitoring service that is priced reasonably, but still provides you with a quality level of service. It’s all about balance. You don’t want to overpay, but you don’t want a service that is so cheap they can’t even afford to properly monitor your website if they wanted to.

Whenever you’re looking for a quality website monitoring service, keep the above tips in mind. By adhering to the above advice, you can ensure that you select a service that provides you with the level of quality you deserve without charging you an arm and a leg.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitor the availability and performance of Internet-connected devices. As part of our website monitoring service, we provide timely alert notifications and access to detailed reporting. We offer monitoring service to all sizes of businesses right from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

Article Source: Website Monitoring Services – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Basics Of Crac Units


The Basics of CRAC Units The Basics of CRAC Units by J.M. Miller

Computer room air conditioning in the previous utilized common air conditioning units - comparable to what you have in your home or work. These legacy units worked adequately but there were environmental gaps in the climate in the computer rooms.For example, in colder months the humidity levels in the computer rooms commonly dropped and high levels of static electricity occurred.
In recent times, CRAC units have become the main stay in big system data centers. Modern day CRAC units provide active climate quality management. Modern CRAC systems are a combination of 3 systems; air conditioner, heater and humidifier. The various systems work in unison to maintain the air quality within the data center is maintained at adequate levels as per the setting specified by the data center personnel. These systems also provide active alerting and monitoring. For instance if fault conditions exist, these units are smart enough to communicate with the data center manager / network operations team and alert them of such conditions.

Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRAC) in today's computer rooms, typically force conditioned air into a raised floor cavity. The raised floor is pressurized with the air volume emitted by these units and is directed out into the data center room via perforated floor tiles. This type of air management is very efficient and allows the data center manager to adequately vent the conditioned air in the correct areas of the computer room environment.

To ensure adequate levels of air conditioning and systems redundancy, abundant data centers at this point utilize several CRAC units acting either in tandem or in parallel configurations. One reason is to condition ample cooling capacity to amply cool the server infrastructure within the designated area and the other reason is to provide levels of redundancy in the event one of the CRAC units were to fail. Typically data centers over compensate cooling capacity to ensure the cooling infrastructure exceeds current requirements and ensures true levels of HVAC redundancy.

As with all fundamentals of technology, computer room cooling technology will continue to evolve over time as greater intelligence will be implemented within these intelligent cooling systems.

J.M. Miller is a technology writer located in Toronto, Canada. J.M. focuses these days mainly in the server colocation marketplace, working with various data center operators in the Canadian area.

Article Source: The Basics of CRAC Units

Thursday 21 February 2013

Managing Your Website Uptime With A Website Monitor


Managing Your Website Uptime With a Website Monitor Managing Your Website Uptime With a Website Monitor by Alertra

In the world of ecommerce, website uptime is everything. Why? Because if your uptime goes down, so do your profits. So how do you ensure that you’re maximizing your site’s uptime? How do you know if you’re getting the uptime you’re being promised? Here are some tips to help you maximize your website uptime and your website profits.

Use a Reputable Web Host:

First and foremost, make sure you’re using a reputable webhost. Anyone can boast an uptime rating of 99.9 percent, but that doesn’t mean they deliver on that promise. Even the uptime guarantees that are made by web host providers aren’t really worth much, considering they usually compensate you just pennies if your site is down more than what they promise it will be. And let’s face it, how will you know if your site is down more than your host says it will be? Chances are they won’t advertise the fact.

Monitoring Your Website’s Downtime:

The only way to ensure that your website has acceptable levels of uptime is to monitor your site’s downtime. Unfortunately you can’t very well sit at a computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week hitting the refresh button to make sure your site is up and running properly. Thankfully, that is where website monitoring services come into play.

When you utilize a website monitor that site monitor will ensure that your site is up and running, even when you’re sound asleep. Keeping an ever-vigilant eye on your site, these companies make sure that your profits aren’t put at risk by unacceptable levels of website downtime. If your website monitor notifies you that your site is down on a frequent basis, you can then take it up with your web host or switch hosts altogether.

Why Not Utilize Free Website Monitoring Services?

There are plenty of website monitors out there that offer services for free. The problem is that the free service is usually a “hook” to get you to upgrade to a paid service. If a company isn’t up front about their pricing, there’s usually a reason for it.

So what’s wrong with a free website monitor? Almost every free website monitor out there notifies you via email when your site goes down. This is a significant problem because when your site goes down, your email may go down with it. This means you’re not alerted to the site outage until it’s been resolved. If you want a comprehensive website monitor, you need one that notifies you via phone and SMS text message in addition to email. This way, if your email goes down with your website, you’ll still know about it and can work to resolve the issue.

Remember, every moment of downtime costs your company money. You need a trusted website monitor to make sure that those losses are mitigated if you want to maximize your website’s profits.

Alertra is a leading provider of web site monitoring and alerting services. We monitor the availability and performance of Internet-connected devices, including your websites, servers and routers 24/7, from all around the world to ensure increased server or website uptime.

Article Source: Managing Your Website Uptime With a Website Monitor

How A Website Monitor Can Save Your Company’s Profits

How a Website Monitor Can Save Your Company’s Profits How a Website Monitor Can Save Your Company’s Profits by Alertra

Website downtime is frustrating. There’s no doubt about it. It causes stress on the part of the website operators and on the part of the customers who are trying to access the site. Stress and frustration, however, are just the beginning of the problem when it comes to unnecessary website outages. For each and every minute that your site is down, that downtime is costing you money. One way to ensure that your site’s downtime isn’t costing you any more than is necessary is to implement the use of a website monitoring service.

How Can a Website Monitoring Service Help?

So how can a website monitoring service help your company when it comes to lost profits? The first thing you need to understand is that when it comes to website downtime, every minute counts. Each minute equates to lost money. How much money you lose depends on how much your website nets each day and what time of the day your site goes down.

Let’s say, for example, that your website makes $15,000 per day and $5,000 of that is between the hours of 3PM and 6PM. This means that between those hours your site is earning approximately $28 per minute. If your site goes down at 2PM and you don’t find out about it until 2:15, you just lost $420 before you even know about the site outage. Had you been utilizing a website monitoring service, you would have known the moment that the site went down – putting you to work faster to get the site back up and running and saving you lost profits.

Utilizing a Website Monitoring Service to Keep an Eye on Your Web Host:

In addition to letting you get to work immediately when your site goes down, a website monitoring service can help you keep an eye on the performance of your web host. If you utilize a website monitoring service and that service notifies you almost daily that you are experiencing some downtime, you know there’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Whether that means fixing a bug with your site, upgrading to a better hosting plan, or switching web hosts altogether, at least you will know that something must be done.

Don’t Throw Away Profits:

Some site owners steer away from website monitoring services because they want to avoid the charges associated with a quality service. The truth is that website monitoring services can actually pay for themselves over time. Using the example mentioned above, that $420 you would lose without a website monitoring service may be more money than you would spend to pay for a service for the entire year.

Don’t be penny wise and dollar foolish. Understand that a website monitor is an investment in the security of your site’s profits and make sure downtime doesn’t eat away at a large percentage of your bottom line.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitor the availability and performance of Internet-connected devices. As part of our website monitoring service, we provide timely alert notifications and access to detailed reporting. We offer monitoring service to all sizes of businesses right from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

Article Source: How a Website Monitor Can Save Your Company’s Profits

Wednesday 20 February 2013

What The Best Wordpress Host Should Offer You

What the Best WordPress Host Should Offer You What the Best WordPress Host Should Offer You by Cedric Loiselle

For those new in the online world, they may have heard about WordPress but they vaguely know what it is all about or what it is used for. WordPress is a blogging platform that allows website owners or bloggers to create their own sites or blogs. WordPress host, on the other hand puts all the information up and running on the web. The online market continuously grows by the day, thus increasing the demand for hosting needs as well. More businesses will create and publish new contents on their sites or blogs and that means more web hosting requirements to cater to. People will be looking out for WordPress hosting providers that will satisfy their web hosting requirements.

Ideally, the best WordPress host should offer you a 99.9% uptime. For many hosting companies, this is easier said and claimed than done. As there are many factors that would be considered when choosing your web hosting partner, it is important to check this topmost concern of almost all web masters or blog owners – 24/7 availability or 99.9% uptime. Continuous visibility is key to a website’s success and effectiveness. And if the site or blog remains hidden somewhere and visitors are not getting a glimpse of it, you might have to check the hosting capability of the WordPress host assuming that search engine optimization elements are in place.

One of the things your WordPress host should offer is security. The best WordPress host takes security very seriously and does nothing less to achieve this. A high level of security and protection from outside vulnerabilities are extremely critical if you are running a website with a host of confidential and sensitive information or data. If the WordPress host does not have layers of security and protection for the valuable data it hosts, no business should be done with such host. In fact, most web hosting companies place this as their top priority because this is a great concern for their clients. And if they don’t address the security needs, they can hardly get any client to stick with them knowing how easily hackers can target sites without solid security and protection.

Also, you should carefully check the hosting company’s data servers in terms of power and scale. These servers should be scalable at some level so that clients can have the flexibility to upgrade as and when the circumstances require. Powerful servers provide the internet users with great performance of the site allowing for smooth navigation and transfer from page to page without losing the target. Good user experience is what webmasters want their users to have so it is important that their access to the website or blog site is continuous and uninterrupted. WordPress host should be able to achieve this without a glitch.

Wouldn’t you be ecstatic if you have a reliable WordPress host and at the same time afford it? Affordability is another important thing to consider in a WordPress host. A secure WordPress hosting provider that offers affordable monthly lease rate is definitely an added bonus. Without compromising security, you end up with a blogging tool and content management system that works efficiently for your website or blogging activities.

For more information about best Wordpress host visit our website http://www.iwphosting.com.

Article Source: What the Best WordPress Host Should Offer You