This is how a website monitoring service works. To ensure your site is available from every part of the world, a website monitoring service sets up independent servers, called Monitoring Agents, in data centers on practically every continent. The Monitoring Agents ping your server and analyze the response with a certain frequency. It’s possible to monitor quite a lot of services: HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, POP3/SMTP, IMAP, DNS, UDP, and many more. If one or more Monitoring Agents detect downtime or server slowdown, an alert message for the webmaster is generated. It usually can be an SMS, email message or an automated phone call.

Most advanced website monitoring services can perform multi-step transactions: for example, monitoring agents can login to your client’s account, choose a DVD in your online-store, then go to the shopping cart and “buy” it, ensuring availability and accessibility of all the purchasing steps for an ordinary customer.

Modern website monitoring services usually offer additional features, such as web load stress tests VoIP monitoring, video streaming service monitoring, and DNS blacklist monitoring. The variety of monitoring tools and notification options mean only one thing: you, and not your customers, will be the first to know that your website is down.