When you choose to run your website from a dedicated server, there are many features and functions that your web hosting company may offer you; one of...
When you choose to run your website from a dedicated server,
there are many features and functions that your web hosting company may offer you; one of those is dedicated server monitoring. But what is this monitoring? And is it good or bad for your site?
With dedicated server monitoring, the web host will monitor the server at all times, keeping track of several factors that affect the website and its performance. Once of the things that’s tracked is the length of uptime, as well as the amount of downtime, the website experiences. While it tracks this data it will put it into chart or graph form and send it to you or your IT consultants. Placing it into a visual format helps those who need it read it quickly and easily. Anything that’s shown on the graph indicating downtime is also placed out as an alert. This draws the consultant’s attention towards it so that they can take the necessary steps to reduce or eliminate that downtime.
Dedicated server monitoring also looks for security threats that have attacked, or tried to attack, the dedicated server. These threats may be viruses, worms, hackers, or anything else that threatens the security of the server. Because these are much more serious in nature, should threats be dedicated during the monitoring, a detailed report will be sent to the webmaster or consultant. That report will include information on the threat, what it is and what it does, as well as a detailed step-by-step process on how to remove the threat from the system.
Dedicated server monitoring, should you choose to use it for your website, is constantly on and it’s constantly keeping track of data for your website; as well as always adding to that information, depending on the site’s performance. Certain graphs, charts, and other data will be contained in reports that are sent out periodically, according to a pre-determined schedule. However, this doesn’t mean that the business owner, or the webmaster, needs to wait for that report to arrive before they can start correcting issues.
Web hosting companies know how critical it is that their customers have a website that’s always up and running, and they feel particularly responsible for this when a customer choose dedicated server monitoring as part of their package. Because of this, with dedicated server monitoring alerts for any and all problems encountered by the site are sent out right away, as soon as they happen. This allows the webmaster to start working on the problems right away, and to get the website back up as soon as possible. How these alerts arrive is up to you but you typically have choices of email, text message, or instant message.
Dedicated server monitoring can be a great help to business owners looking for added security for their site, especially if they’re the one managing the site on their own. However, it’s important to seriously consider this option before you choose it, and that you see if your web host will charge extra for it. Many don’t, but some also include this an upgrade, which also makes it much pricier.
