Internet, Cyber Security, WordPress security, Identity security
One possible reason for the website downtime could be the malicious attack by the hackers. Hacker attacks have become the growing threat for every business website both large and small. Sometimes, the attack could be so huge that it may even take down the websites of big internet giants. Especially, if an attack happens on the internet servers, it is typical that hundreds of websites will be taken offline for hours affecting the web traffic. One of the major attacks happened in 2016, when hackers targeted the data centers of a domain name services company called Dyn. It has disrupted traffic to hundreds of websites including Twitter, Netflix, Paypal, the Financial Times, GitHub, disabling access to millions of users.
With many such incidents occurring every year, it’s no wonder that site owners are seeking alert services like website monitoring services for the protection of their websites. It is a wise option to employ preventive methods by having complete monitoring for websites such as uptime monitoring and performance monitoring, rather than implement corrective actions when such issues happen.
Ways That Hackers can Attack the Websites
There are many ways that hackers can plan to attack a website. Sometimes, they may exploit a system or network using the latest technology or reuse the same method that has worked out for years. It can be as big as bringing down the entire network of user websites or may target a particular site for specific intention. From phishing scam to password hacking and fault injection of source code, hackers follow different tactics to hurt websites to bring them down.
One such way is DDos or Distributed Denial of Services attack, where the hackers overwhelm the server or network with more traffic than it could deal with and sabotage the functionality of the website. This may eventually slow down the performance or totally shut down the website working. Having a flexible hosting plan with extended resources may help websites to handle the incoming volume of traffic to some extent, but cannot sustain if the server is attacked by too many requests.
Do You Need to Worry if You Have a Small Website?
Hacker attacks are not only risks for websites, but also a threat for customer accounts, especially if the site is dealing with credit or debit card information. On the contrary, sometimes hackers may not steal the personal data but may use the system as a tool to reach another system or network. So even a small website can become part of the hack to reach larger targets. As far as downtime is concerned, the effect would be frustrating for small business websites because the attack can significantly damage their business bottom line. Hence, it is essential even for small business site owners to put some preventive measures in place for their websites to minimize downtime risk and be prepared for the worst.
Use Monitoring Services to Minimize Downtime Risks
With website monitoring service, the site owners will know ahead of time if there is an interruption in website functionality. When a site is being constantly monitored, any discrepancy in site functionality will be known before the site actually goes down. The service would detect short or occasional downtimes or slow response times of the websites. As soon as an issue is detected, the site monitoring service would notify immediately. This helps to drill down and understand the reason for interruption, so the site owners can have an action plan in place to get things back to normal.
Top 10 Best Website Monitoring Services
AppDynamics is a fully realized website monitoring service for businesses, and a leader in both the website monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM) spaces.
New Relic Browser provides a rich ecosystem of performance and monitoring data for your web sites and applications. It’s a bit much for smaller businesses, but for medium to large organizations or anyone with a business-critical web presence, it’s a boon.
Website monitoring service SmartBear AlertSite has great real-time alerting capabilities, strong monitoring and reports across platforms, and its highly configurable both in its user interface and its pricing for SMBs and enterprises.
Dynatrace UEM is a surprisingly intuitive and well designed website monitoring tool with excellent reporting and dashboards. While it could use some additional capabilities around APM, synthetic monitoring, and some other advanced features, it’s still an excellent choice for medium to large-sized operators.
If your devices are geographically distributed and all your sites have internet connectivity, then it’s hard to find a solution better than Logic Monitor. For smaller networks that could be walled off from the internet, you will need to look elsewhere.
Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals is nicely designed for beginners and small businesses, while still offering an excellent feature set with thorough analytics.
SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor is focused on synthetic monitoring and sports excellent features and analytics in that direction, though they’re wrapped in a slightly outdated interface. But if user monitoring or real-time analytics are your thing, you’ll need to keep looking.
For IT professionals and serious website operators, Pingdom has it all – strong monitoring, excellent analytics, and advanced features, too. The only downside is that all this goodness is wrapped in a difficult interface that requires a steep learning curve to leverage.
Ghostery MCM is highly focused on front-end monitoring through third-party tag tracking. This is both innovative and valuable, but as it lacks many other core website monitoring capabilities it’ll be more of an addition to your IT tool kit rather than a foundation.
Geckoboard is well-designed for small businesses or newbies to website management. But its focus on disseminating rather than surfacing data means it’s not meant to act as a standalone website management tool.
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