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.

In this blog we’ve already discussed the importance of response time. And I hardly need to tell you that when a website loads slowly, you’d rather take your business, reservation, purchase or pleasure somewhere else. So, now that you have your website up and running, you definitely don’t want it to be an underachiever and drive those potential clients away simply because it fails to load properly. So here are 5 simple ways to improve your website response time without too much effort.

Ping is so simple and so useful. In previous posts we mentioned ping a couple of times and the good work it does. The fact that ping has not changed much over the last 20+ years means it is on the right track. Now, what if you had that precious little tool with you all the time? You can check the availability of any network hardware on the Internet in a matter of seconds.

Ping is now widely available for mobile phones and it doesn't matter whether you are a devoted iPhone user, Nokia lover or Android hugger. There is a ping tool available for all popular mobile phone platforms.

We might have mentioned TTL in some of the previous posts related to Ping and Traceroute. TTL, or Time To Live is the transmission limit of a given data unit in a TCP/IP or UDP based computer network.

A data packet with a TTL value of 64 will cease to exist if it hasn't reach its end target in 64 iterations. The purpose of the TTL field is to avoid a situation in which an undeliverable datagram keeps circulating on an Internet system, a system that will eventually become swamped by such immortal datagrams.