3 Reasons Why It’s a Bad Idea to Buy Site Monitoring from Your Web Host
by Louis Kingston
For baseball pitchers, the two most glorious words in the English language are “perfect game.” For actors, it’s “Oscar win” (forget all that nonsense about how “it’s an honor just to be nominated.”). For school-aged kids, it’s “snow day.” And for businesses, of course, it’s “captive audience.”
Indeed, it doesn’t matter how compelling or clever a marketing and advertising campaign might be. If audiences don’t take notice and pay attention, it may as well not exist. And if you doubt this, think of the last time you sat through 20 minutes of movie trailers — not because you wanted to, but because there was nowhere else to go (at least, not without saying “excuse me…” 10 times as you painfully twisted and squirmed your way past annoyed fellow moviegoers).
Why does this matter? It’s because your web host is singing from the captive audience songbook when it repeatedly urges you to add site monitoring to your existing hosting package. At first glance, this may seem like a good idea. After all, you know that site monitoring is important. Why not just grab it from your web host, the same way you grab a side order of fries from a fast food restaurant? Well here’s why not:
- Lack of Specialization
Your web host doesn’t specialize in site monitoring, which means they aren’t using the latest technology or hiring the most qualified professionals. Just as you wouldn’t want your doctor to sell you a timeshare during an exam (“You know what might help that bronchitis? Two weeks a year in a sunny and warm Florida condo, as you can see from this lovely brochure”), you don’t want your site monitoring company to do anything but site monitoring. It’s not something anyone should be dabbling in.
- Lack of Service Offering
When web hosts offer site monitoring, they typically focus on uptime. But site monitoring isn’t just about letting you know when your site goes dark. It’s also about making sure that your site is performing the way it’s supposed to — which means that all elements are functional (e.g. buttons, forms, multi-step processes, etc.), and all pages are loading rapidly. Without this critical information, you may believe that everything with your site is fine and all lights are green; that is, until you begin hearing from irate customers and start losing sales.
- Potential Conflict of Interest
Last but not least, your site host is supposed to meet an uptime standard as part of their service commitment. But if that same host is also monitoring your site performance, they may be less inclined to be completely transparent if they fall below this standard. And if they did fudge some of the numbers, how would you even know? With this in mind, are we saying that all hosts that offer site monitoring are unethical? Absolutely not. Are we saying that there is an inherent conflict of interest that should be at least concerning and troubling? You bet.
The Simple, Smart Solution
The best (and really, the only) way to solve this problem is to avoid it completely — which means not site monitoring from your host, and instead getting it from a proven, reputable vendor that:
- Specializes in site monitoring — it’s all they do 24/7/365.
- Offers both uptime monitoring and comprehensive performance monitoring — not just the former.
- Has zero conflict of interest telling you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth regarding how your site is doing.
Ready to safeguard and strengthen your business with world-class, surprisingly affordable site monitoring? Then you’re ready for AlertBot! We check all of these boxes, and are trusted by some of the world’s biggest companies. Start your free trial now.
Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.
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