Why You Need To Start Monitoring Your Domain Name Now in 2021

2021 is going to be a year ahead that'll see a surge in the number of new websites being created, and with new websites being created it's never been ever more important to start monitoring your domain name.

When you buy a domain for a website and set it up so that your hosting's name servers and domain link together, there's typically no easy way to monitor whether your domain is working or not.

Not knowing whether your domain name is working is actually working is like having no business at all.

So in this blog post, I'm going to tell you why you need to start monitoring your domain name right now.

What is domain monitoring?

Domain monitoring is very similar to website monitoring, except, the difference lies between the fact that your domain name points to your website.

And your website is where people land to find out more information about you, so technically speaking, you need both forms of monitoring to be in place on your site.

Whenever someone types your website URL into their browser, they're being redirected to your website through your domain which contains DNS information linked to it.

If your domain was down, for instance, if your domain expired, you wouldn't be able to get anyone onto your website, which in turn could mean loss of revenue right.

And I'm sure you don't want that.

Most websites will be put live and most website owners might assume that it's the responsibility of your web hosting provider to ensure that your website remains up...

Whilst this is somewhat true for the server that your site lives on, it isn't their responsibility to ensure that your domain is renewed when it's time, it's your responsibility.

Do I really need to monitor my domain?

Yes, you do.

As I said above, it's not the web hosting's responsibility to ensure that your domain is working, it's your responsibility.

I get it though, you thought they'd monitor your domain when you started paying for the hosting right?

One of the first things that I did as soon as I launched the domain monitor was to add the domain to a popular domain monitoring tool such as Uptime Robot, there's many domain monitoring tools on the market.

Chances are, most of these tools will offer more than just domain monitoring, and by domain monitoring, I mean they'll be checking your domain's expiry date, and will alert you before your domain expires.

Could you imagine the costs that would be incurred if a popular website went down, website downtime as a result of domain expiry should never happen...

In my opinion, it's actually quite a careless thing to do, and your reputation would be hurt if you let your domain expire and never thought to add it to a domain monitoring tool first.

Monitoring your domain name with a website monitoring tool

Despite the very similar definitions, you need to use a website monitoring tool to monitor your domain and site together.

Our tool offers domain monitoring and website monitoring all under one roof, in one place so that you don't have to go elsewhere or use multiple services.

Our domain monitor is free to sign up to, and like many website monitoring tools, has many advantages as to why you'd sign up, here's a few:

Keep happy customers

If you aren't monitoring your domain name and it expires, or your website goes down and your customers can't access your site, what will they think?

If you're lucky, they might forgive you if it's a once in a blue moon situation, but chances are, as your site grows, you could experience more frequent downtime that will cause unhappy customers.

How would you feel if you were purchasing a product on a site and all of a sudden everything stopped working?

Likely quite unhappy, and you'd question the site's reliability and might even go elsewhere

Ensure excellent SEO rankings

SEO is an important topic to cover to increase your organic search rankings, and the way this works is like this...

When your pages and website start ranking in the search engine, crawlers will come and index your site - as long as your site is accessible.

If your domain name isn't being monitored, it might just be that although your domain hasn't expired, it's actually misconfigured and has missing registrar data linked to it...

If this is the case, and that there's something here preventing the crawlers from accessing your site, you aren't going to ensure excellent SEO rankings and could even lose rankings in the search engine.

Don't lose sales

If you're an E-Commerce website and rely on making sales through your website as a primary form of making money, you need to be strict about keeping a check on your site's uptime, and your domain name.

Why?

Because if you don't, it will end up costing you a lot of money, and you're probably wondering how do I know that it'll cost you a lot of money right?

Well, I have evidence...

Take a look at how much an AWS outage costs, you're talking potentially millions of dollars.

This is why ensuring that your domain remains online to keep your sales coming in is critical isn't it.

Domain monitoring tools don't cost much

Typically website and domain monitoring tools will have both a free package and various subscription based packages.

If you're a startup business with a small website, chances are you'll be fine with a free package offered by many tools.

However, if you're a medium to large website, you're probably going to be better off subscribing to a package that has more features.

Why?

Because more often than not, free domain monitors will have a limited checking frequency in terms of how often they check and crawl your site, typically it could be as low as 5 or 10 minutes for a free plan.

However, if you subscribe to a domain monitor subscription plan, you could get more frequent checks such as every few minutes...

You aren't going to want your website going down just as someone is about to land on your site to purchase a product.

So by ensuring your site is added to a monitoring tool, you'll be ensuring that your checking to make sure your site doesn't go down!