5 Kick-Ass Benefits Of Ping Monitoring To Improve Your Website

If you've got a website that you've been working on for months and have hundreds if not thousands of customers, then ensuring that the server you're hosting it on is online and reachable by your network and by your customers is extremely vital!

Ping monitoring is a great way to check whether your server is available or not, and see, in real-time how the server is performing.

Did you know that page speed and available contributes to your SEO score and page ranking factor? It's a technical SEO ranking factor of your website, so ensuring your website is reachable with ping monitoring is vital.

In this article, I'm going to take you through the benefits of ping monitoring and help you understand why you need to be monitoring your website today.

Ready? Let's dive right in.

Understanding Ping Monitoring

Unlike website monitoring that creates HTTP requests to your website's domain name, ping monitoring actually pings your server's IP address, or your domain name and checks to see if it's available.

Does that make sense?

To help understand it a bit more, here's some differences:

• Website monitoring - will send a request to your website as if it was a real user visiting the website, it listens for the response code and this is sent back to the monitoring tool and logged, if the code doesn't match what's considered to be an OK code, your website is marked as being down
• Ping monitoring - your server has an IP address (and hopefully a domain name), ping monitoring uses this to check the server's uptime and availability, it doesn't make a HTTP request, and doesn't test the uptime of the website itself, ping simply checks whether the server is reachable and available

There are several other types of monitoring available, such as monitoring your API, which can work really well alongside ping monitoring.

You see, website monitoring can only ever tell you your website is up if the monitoring tool can reach the website, otherwise, it's marked as down in monitoring tools, all we're doing here, is ensuring that your server is online.

How Do I Monitor My Server's Health Using Ping Monitoring?

If your server is under-performing, then your customers are going to be directly affected, they might leave your website entirely and shop elsewhere and may never come back to you.

Would you like that?

Of course not, so it's in your best interest to ensure that your server's health is in good working order, and this will include:

• Checking for security updates and patches
• Making sure you've got the right server permissions set up
• Figuring out how to handle unscheduled website downtime
• Putting a plan together for upgrading the server
• Ensuring the physical security of the server remains high

These are of course just a few reasons, I'm sure you'll read them and realise that there are many others as well...

One server health point that I didn't directly mention though because I want to go through it now, is what is an acceptable server response time?

You might think that a normal server response time is around 500ms right? It turns out that a response time closer to 200ms is acceptable and shows good server health.

Any more than that there might be something wrong, sure, it's fine for your response time to go up and down, and be especially higher when carrying out intensive tasks, but should generally sit lower most of the time.

Ping monitoring can help you identify what the response time actually is.

5 Kick-Ass Benefits of Ping Monitoring

Let's dive into some of the benefits of ping monitoring so that you can get a better understanding of why it's important.

Improved Security Of Your Server

Did you know that 63% of companies in the 12 months prior to March 2020 said that their data was potentially compromised at a physical level due to a potential hardware failure or silicon-level security breach?

Do you have customers on your website?

Maybe you've got an E-Commerce website that sells products or a blog with a membership area, whatever the scenario may be, ping monitoring can help improve the security of your server.

How?

Because you're constantly monitoring your server's availability and performance, and identifying a potential upwards trend in slow performance might be an indication that your hardware is failing or worse still, an attack on your server.

Increased Business Profits

Are you an entrepreneur? If you're trying to make money online then one of the 100 ways to make money should also include ping monitoring, and let me tell you why...

Website downtime costs a lot of money, so for every second that your website is down, is an extra second where you could be losing thousands.

With ping monitoring, you can ensure that your server's availability is available all of the time so that you don't have to keep checking, and if you don't have to keep checking yourself, you're saving yourself time, and time is money.

Furthermore, if you didn't have a ping monitoring tool, you might not be able to identify as soon as your server stops working, which in turn could cost a lot of money.

Accurate Server Uptime Data

Without a ping monitoring tool you're going to be in the dark, guessing whether your server is online, when you last checked it, what the response times were and so on...

You might use a Google sheet to track uptime data so that you can build a graph over time right?

This can take a lot of time

Ping Monitoring Tools Are Free

One of the biggest benefits of a ping monitoring tool is that they're typically free and are offered as part of a package of other features...

There are loads of tools out there, such as the one from Oh Dear, you do have to pay a monthly fee, but when compared to other tools, I've signed up and their service is great!

Alternatively, you can use our domain monitor. We offer ping monitoring for free as part of a package of other features such as website uptime monitoring and domain monitoring, so if you're interested in that, you can sign up here.

Monitoring Checkpoints Across The Globe

The world is a big place, and there are lots of people on the planet, so ensuring that your server is up for all of your users across the globe is pretty important.

With most ping monitoring tools, you'll be able to get monitoring checkpoints from different locations, and it's not a feature you turn on or off, it's included automatically and works extremely well.

Hopefully you've enjoyed this article, and have been convinced about the benefits of ping monitoring and I hope to see you signed up to our tool soon!