When are you performing your next website maintenance? It is night time, yes? Well, let us give you a few pointers on how to do it more smoothly.

Any intentional website downtime requires that you consider 4 main parties - your partners, your current and prospective users, and the search engines. Luckily, the tips below cater to all three.

There are many different components by which you can measure the performance of your website - uptime, availability, speed, ease of use, etc. One of these components, which is by far the third most important after only availability and uptime, is the response time. In essence, response time is the total amount of time needed to download all the components of the page that the user is visiting.

You can use the free web page test tool to check out the response time of a random page below:

In our previous post we discussed the email round-trip monitoring level as the best solution for prevention of email outages. Today we will dig a little deeper and see the possible scenarios which the email round-trip test can follow. Let me clarify what the email round-trip test actually does.

First, our monitoring agent connects to the SMTP server that you have specified or retrieved automatically through the MX records and sends a test message. By doing this, our system verifies that your SMTP server is working properly. Next, the agent will try to log into the POP3/IMAP server and retrieve the message. If the message is received, the test will be considered successful and the message will be deleted. If, on the other hand, the message is not found in the mailbox after a certain period, which is configurable and usually between 5 and 15 minutes, the check will be considered a failure and you will be alerted.

Since you are reading this blog I can safely assume that you already know how e-mail works. The main problem occurs when it doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter whether you are running a business or running an errand – if your e-mail is not working, you are losing information. The truth is that most businesses experience at least one e-mail outage every year and this downtime, combined with the recovery costs can add up to hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

But what causes the e-mail outages?

There are many reasons why an e-mail system can stop functioning, but at a first glance the e-mail outages can be planned and unplanned.

When you start searching for a reliable monitoring solution, be it to see if you have chosen a good hosting provider or in an attempt to optimize your site, there are some things you need to consider to help you make the most of the monitoring service. Here are a few guidelines will  make this selection process easy.

Identify Your Goals

Choosing a monitoring service is much easier when you know your goals. Most services on the monitoring market offer different monitoring levels, so to select the best one for you, first identify your objective. For example, if you need to be constantly in the loop about the status of your server, a simple server monitoring level at a low interval (say every 10 minutes) will do the trick. However, if you are interested in seeing how your whole website performs, you’d better look into a more sophisticated option, which will verify that all of your website’s components are downloaded properly from an end-user perspective.