Website monitoring significantly lowers your operational costs and increases your company's value.

From the real end-user perspective, independent and objective website monitoring is the most efficient approach for keeping your web operations' costs as low as possible. (TL;DR;)

I. Direct, passive loss from downtime:

Every time your website is down, you lose money. "Passive" means the losses resulting from the unavailability of the website or some of its systems and components.

1. Website downtime:

Downtime is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for your website's overall performance.

As long as your website or some of its systems and components are unavailable, it is considered "downtime." Usually, your ISPs are presenting to you the opposite statistics - the uptime. Numbers like 99% or 99.9% per year look pretty impressive. However, in the first case, your website was unavailable for 87 hours, and in the second case - for almost 9 hours.

Downtime consists of three components:

• Period of time between the occurrence of a malfunction and its detection;
• Period of time needed for localization of the problem and detection of its source (cause) by the IT support team;
• Period of time required by the IT support team for troubleshooting.

WebSitePulse monitoring, problem detection, alert triggering, and multimedia notifications reduce the first component of downtime by up to 80%. You will be the first to know of a problem minutes after its occurrence.

Special features such as snapshot, traceroute, and forced monitoring allow fast and precise allocation of the source of the malfunction, leading to a decrease of the second component of the downtime by up to 70%.

We have no control over your IT team's effectiveness; therefore, the downtime's third component cannot be influenced by us. However, service options such as "remote hand" or "takeover" allow immediate intervention and problem solutions delivered by WebSitePulse 24/7 tech support representatives. In some cases, IT team mobilization is unnecessary, and significant time and resources could be spared.

2. Loss of general costs:

General maintenance costs are the money you pay to have your website up and running.

Almost none of the services needed for your web operations do work as a utility (yet). Therefore, you make fixed payments regularly without considering downtime minutes. For every hour of downtime, the money you have paid is lost.

Reducing your downtime through website monitoring improves your overall Return Of Investments (ROI) at a fraction of the money you otherwise would lose.

3. Loss of advertising dollars:

Most web-advertising and promotion campaigns are based on the pay-per-click (PPC) model. Basically, you pay for every click on your ad links or banners. And every time, you lose money if the webpage is unavailable. For all the clicks made while your website or the specific web page was down, your ROI will equal zero, and all the money paid will be a direct loss.

Active loss - discussed below - will occur in all those situations when the web page linked to your ad is accessible. Still, an unauthorized content change occurred without your knowledge (defacing). Not only will you lose your per-click payment, but your risk of a total loss of credibility will increase exponentially.

Monitoring the links, the content, and the availability of your critical web pages is acceptable protection for the responsible website owner or operator. As there are no complete protection solutions or 100% guarantees, being the first to know about the problem is the only way for you to stay in control and effectively address the upcoming issues.

4. Loss of transactions:

For every hour of downtime, all web transactions that could have taken place will be lost.

In this case, you do not lose the money you have already paid (as mentioned above) but are shutting down the opportunity to generate revenue. And this is a severe loss.

Reduce your risk of loss of web transactions and revenue by using a simple and cost-effective web transaction monitoring service that will "watch" your web systems and components. At the same time, you take care of your core business.

II. Indirect passive loss from downtime:

If losing prepaid money or current web transactions are the immediate and direct effects of your website unavailability, there are longer-term, indirect consequences, as well.

1. Loss of website traffic:

Conversion Ratios are important for e-commerce websites and web operations where the "eyeballs" count.

In some cases, visits are converted into sales or leads, while in others - visits are converted into clicks. Either way, the law of the big numbers plays the most critical role. Even at a small conversion ratio, the absolute results look better with higher traffic to your website. Not speaking of greater ratios?

What is the traffic you would lose in an hour of downtime? How this affects your conversion ratios?

With 87 hours of lost traffic in a year (99% uptime), is a typical WebSitePulse monitoring configuration ($300/year*) worth it for your business?

2. Loss of image:

When your website is down, your customers will not be pleasantly surprised.

Two scenarios might affect in two different ways your image:

• "This page is unavailable" is the message they receive until one of them (angry) calls your (unprepared) representatives at your 800 number and triggers the alarm. Wrong! They will continue to see that same message until your IT people fix the problem.
• Any web-based business that cares about its customers would handle this situation differently. A nice apology would be displayed only minutes after the malfunction; fixing the problem will take up to 90% less. All the representatives answering the 800 number will be aware of the situation and ready to handle it professionally.

3. Returning Customers ratio:

As the conversion ratio is important for first-time buyers, returning customers ratio is critical for overall operational costs.

Retaining customers is cheaper, revenue flow is more stable, and the overall business risk decreases with a relatively constant customer base.

Unavailable websites, unstable web systems, broken web transactions, and malfunctioning web components could only ruin your efforts to retain your customers, and increase your overall costs, as you will have to count mainly on new first-time buyers. And this is the more costly proposition.

4. Cost of driving customers on your website:

This last aspect of the passive losses brings the above-described problem further: rebuilding your traffic requires promotion.

Promotions - in any form and shape - drive your cost up (or your profit margins down).

This is one of the most disturbing indirect negative effects of website downtime and unavailability. We all understand that competition is only one click away and that losing existing or potential customers is easy and free. Just don't redirect them to your competitors because your website is down, and you don't know about it because of a lack of website monitoring.

How much does it cost to attract new customers or return the old ones?

Using continuous remote monitoring services will help you not lose them. And we believe this is a better and more cost-efficient strategy.

III. "Active" loss:

We define a web-business loss as an "active" when caused while the website was up and running.

Phishing, pharming, and website defacing are some of the techniques observed over the years, and they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In all these cases, some unauthorized change has been made - web content, links, DNS, etc. As a result, the original website is up and running, and downtime is not an issue. However, customers see different content, and attempts are made for their credit card information or identity to be stolen.

While in the case of the "passive" loss, the web transactions or even the communication between the client and the website do not take place at all, in the "active" loss scenarios, people actively become victims of various frauds.

Rebuilding traffic, image, or customer base after one or more such situations is costly, painful, and long. It becomes a real challenge for the web-based business.

Upscale website monitoring service provided by WebSitePulse analyze web content and components and alert you if even the slightest change is detected.

Your customers' and users' security is vital to your business. More and more Internet users are concerned about it and avoid unsecured websites. WebSitePulse's SSL Certificate Monitoring will let you know as soon as there is any problem with your certificate expiration and validity.

E-mail server functionality and two ways e-mail flow is checked in a pre-set interval to ensure normal service level is continuously maintained (email round-trip monitoring).

Network components and devices could also be monitored to build a complete proactive system of immediate problem detection, real-time alert, and multimedia notification.

Why monitoring?

At WebSitePulse, we believe that using monitoring services is part of the responsible behavior, proactive stance, and cost-conscious attitude of the modern web-business owner or operator.

With the increasing complexity of the Internet and the intensifying e-competition, websites' availability and smooth functionality will become an even more important competitive advantage.

In the near future, the question will be: Why not monitor?

Sign Up for our 30 Days Free Trial to experience the potential of our advanced system.

 

TL;DR; Why Monitoring?

In today's information age, a smoothly operating website is a vital part of your business that provides a distinct competitive advantage. A website that fails to deliver its content either in a timely manner or at all causes visitors to quickly lose interest, sending them to the "just a click-away" competitor. Ensuring that all of the elements of your website are functioning properly is critical to maximizing your company's web investment and protecting your customer loyalty.

Without website monitoring:

- Your ROI declines as you lose revenue but cover the same operational costs;
- Your web-advertising ROI is zero, as the precious clicks you paid for lead to unavailable pages;
- Your conversion ratio erodes because of failed transactions and disrupted traffic;
- Your returning customers' ratio is damaged because of loss of credibility and redirecting existing customers to the competition;
- Your external and internal flow of communication is interrupted if your e-mail systems do not function properly, creating the potential of substantial loss;
- Your image is damaged, increasing your promotional efforts and costs;
- If unauthorized content is uploaded on your website and you are unaware of it, your visitors might become victims of fraud, and their personal or credit card information could be stolen. In this case, we would not even try to assess the potential damage to your business.

With website monitoring provided by WebSitePulse.com:

- Your downtime is reduced by up to 80%;
- Special features such as snapshot, traceroute, and forced monitoring help to instantly identify the source of the malfunctions and allow IT support teams to start troubleshooting immediately;
- Instant alerts and multimedia notifications allow your entire organization to stay on top of the web problems, to react adequately, and to gain customer respect instead of losing Image and credibility;
- E-mail system functionality, as well as two ways e-mail flows are checked in a pre-set interval to ensure that normal service levels are continuously maintained;
- You will be immediately alerted if there is an issue with your SSL certificate.
- Upscale monitoring services such as full-page monitoring analyze web content and components and alert you if a change of any kind is detected;
- Network components and devices are monitored to build a complete proactive system of immediate problem detection, real-time alerts, and multimedia notifications.

Sign Up for our 30 Days Free Trial to experience the potential of our advanced system.

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* Varies depending on monitoring configuration.