More and more organisations are relying on their websites to provide their customers and clients with information.  If a potential customer visits your website and it is not working or a page is missing you could potentially lose that customer, regular occurrences could be a significant cost.
 
There are many potential causes of website downtime & missing pages such as your:
 
Web hosting company has an outage – many companies offer a 99% website uptime guarantee, but at 99% reliable that is over 88 hours per year that your website could be down. 
 
Changes have been made to the site – if you update your own website you may not  have the time to check that the whole site is working correctly after updates and some developers also do not check when they make amendments.  Typing errors, general mistakes all happen with ten webpages it can be a large task to check all elements are working correctly, with thousands it can be impossible.
 
Updates made by the web hosting company – web hosts will usually regularly patch or update their servers to keep them secure, the majority of these hosts would not check that your site is still working after each patch is applied.
 
How long until problems are found?
 
It is often the case that problems are only fixed when they are found by you the company and either highlighted to your Web Host or fixed if you your web developer.  Depending on how often you look at each page in detail on your website it could be hours, days, weeks, months….
 
The Alternative
 
Firstly websites can be developed to ‘self monitor’ informing you of errors or missing pages, this is a good system as it can be tuned to errors when customers are using the webpage and provide ‘user friendly’ error messages to the customer, which is more professional than a page not found error!
 
Secondly, what happens if the website is not working at all or if you want to find any missing pages before the customer or client does?  External monitoring can help this issue which can check that the website is ‘working’ on regular intervals but also, perhaps daily, check for any missing pages or ‘dead’ links (links to other, external websites that no longer exist).
 
The Solution
 
Finn Consultants can provide the solution you require.  We can recommend stable Web Hosting companies that can provide the level of support to suit your needs and budget, develop self monitoring websites for you or add a level of self monitoring to your current website.  We can also provide a monitoring solution be it a subscribed service which is run by us or another company, or a software solution which runs on your computers or servers.
 For a reliable website call us now, we are based in Exeter Devon, Bude Cornwall & Holsworthy Devon.