#website monitoring services

E-banking and other digital financial services have paved the way for remote businesses to revolutionize real estate, technology and other globally dominating industries.

The key to safe e-banking is 24/7 website monitoring, support, and intrusion detection. Think of website monitoring as home security systems or surveillance cameras. Without constant and continuous monitoring of a banking website, hackers could intrude the moment the e-banking website’s guard is down. Just like physical lockers aren’t just locked some of the time or only monitored for a few hours out of each day, banks need to ensure that their websites are also under digital protection 365 days of the year, without any prolonged downtime or cyber-threats looming around the corner.

Here are some of the reasons why it is an absolute must for e-banking services to employ efficient website monitoring services:

Cyber Security

Having a system that detects any potential cyber threat should be of paramount importance in the e-banking sector. After all, if a hacker can gain access to a bank’s back end and take the service down or even merely disrupt the operation of the institution’s tools or apps, one would naturally also believe that the same hacker might gain access to the account holder’s sensitive data. Because privacy and security are such important features of online banking, all financial institutions that conduct business on the Internet should have a website monitoring service in place.

An astute website monitoring service will not only immediately alert the service provider of the cyberattack, but will also aid in tracking the source of the malicious activity so such incidents do not occur in the future.

Downtime Monitoring

magine a person is met with a serious accident and requires immediate financial transaction from their family, but alas, their e-banking service provider is down unannounced and they have no update on when the website will be back up and working.

This shows the bank in a terrible light and will permanently break the customer’s faith in the services. Banks need to provide their customers contextual communication during a website downtime and other serious incidents to keep the customer’s confidence in them intact. This will only be possible if they receive immediate alerts about their website outage before disgruntled customers begin to post their negative experiences on social media.

SSL Certificate

An e-banking website without an active SSL certificate is akin to embarking on a self-sabotage mission. An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that verifies the identity of a website and allows for a secure connection.

It encrypts sensitive account holder’s data and ensures that there is no leak while the transaction is taking place. An expired SSL certificate will thwart a customer from availing of the transaction services due to their justified doubts over the service provider’s authenticity and security.

Having competent website monitoring tools in place ensures that the bank is alerted way before their SSL certificate is on the verge of expiration, so they can renew it well ahead of time and avoid any loss of credibility in the future.

Insights

Ingenious website monitoring tools not only send businesses instant alerts and notifications but also give them regular insights into your website performance. This helps institutions, especially as important as the banks, to understand their fluctuating market better. They get insights into the demographics of their customers, transaction trends, etc., which help them improve their e-banking services.

Revenue

A poorly monitored website will sooner or later cause a huge revenue loss to the business. First, the constant unannounced downtimes will frustrate the customers who are in a hurry to make a financial transaction, then cyber threats and a lack of an active SSL certificate will dissuade them from visiting the e-banking website, and finally, lack of any concerns for the customers will make the company lose out on huge revenue. All this can be avoided by investing in resources that will keep you in a real-time loop with your website performance without having to manually watch over it. An efficient website monitoring system will only fortify the customers’ faith in the banking institution and will lead to long-term revenue growth.

Partner Up With Us!

Banking and financial institutions need website monitoring more than almost any other type of service. Awakish’s prompt and insightful website monitoring tools cater to all the above services and more!

We provide advanced and acute services to our clients across all the top industries so they can execute their business goals in peace, while we take care of all their website monitoring needs. Contact our support team to know more!

We live in an era where right from banking and getting degrees, to buying mittens for your puppy, everything has shifted online. So making sure that your e-commerce is up and functioning all the time, without the menace of a prolonged website downtime should be your top priority.

A network outage has a domino effect on the entire company. It first starts off with negative reviews on the unforgiving platform of social media, then gives your competitor an edge, and finally leads to a massive revenue loss.

But seek consolation in the fact that even the biggest of companies in the history of human civilization suffer frequent downtimes.

There has been a surge of website outages recently, and we’re talking some gigantic names. Here are just a few of them:

Tesla

On 23rd September 2020, Tesla experienced the company’s biggest-ever outage. It suffered an hour-long worldwide server downtime that left the luxury car owners unable to connect to their vehicle- neither through the mobile app nor the website. Tesla’s other energy products like Tesla solar, and home battery systems were rendered out of order too. The downtime was reportedly triggered due to an internal failure of their application programming interface (API). However, the Tesla team was quick to detect and remedy the outage, and the functions were reinstated within half an hour.

Meta

No website downtime list is ever complete without the mention of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (earlier Facebook).

The tech superpower boasts of connecting people from every remote corner through media like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. However, on 4th October 2021, it suffered one of the biggest downtimes in the history of the internet. The social media giant was down for mindboggling 7 hours!

It left a good portion of the world in confusion (remember switching on/off your Wi-Fi router several times in frustration?), and wrecked communication for several hours. Zuckerberg blamed it on a server update gone awry after profusely apologizing to those affected.

Users took to Twitter to post nasty memes about Meta’s frequent outages and the company ended up with a loss of approximately $80 million in just ad revenue!

AWS

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is virtually synonymous with public cloud computing. Apart from computing, it also caters to networking, storage, security etc. Some of the biggest companies that employ their services are Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola and Disney. According to a report by Forbes, AWS controls about 33% of the internet. So, one can imagine the nightmare e-commerce all over the world went through when it suffered not just one but several outages in 2021.

The biggest one transpired on 7th December when the services were inaccessible for more than 8 hours. Well-known brands experienced a huge loss and aggrieved customers took to social media to express their dismay in not-so-kind words.

AWS blamed the downtime on automated software that triggered an “unexpected behaviour” in the internal network and finally knocked out the system.

It took their IT team several hours to resolve the issue and caused a whopping loss of over $100 million.

Google

What is the first thought that instinctively crosses your mind when you run into something you have no knowledge about? To Google it of course! But what if the same messiah were to abandon you abruptly multiple times in a year?

Google (and its online services) encountered several major global blackouts in 2020 (most notably in August, November, and December).

The issue in August was caused by an internal storage quota malfunction and it dragged down indispensable services like Google Maps, Calendar, Workspaces, YouTube, etc. This lasted approximately over six hours. The outage derailed communication and disturbed workspaces across the world.

On April 12, 2021, Google was hit by partial downtime when their Google Docs tools were inaccessible to the users. The team did not post any official statement on what exactly was happening and instead, let everyone hang with the typical “we are experiencing disruption” message.

Google home services too had to bear the wrath of people when they failed to respond to the commands and kept asking the users to “set up the device” instead.

Fastly

On 8th June 2021, the hashtag #InternetIsDown began to trend across the world. Hundreds of websites were inaccessible and people were met with “error 503” everywhere. So what exactly happened?

Fastly is a cloud computing service provider for several well-known businesses such as Amazon, Reddit, and CNN. Their services include Content Delivery Network (CDN) solutions, cloud security, and other leading cloud optimization tools.

The tech giant was ambushed by a global network outage last year. This was caused due to an obscure software bug prompted by a customer configuration. According to them, an update was sent out to the users on their servers, but the update carried a bug that eventually “broke the internet” for a while. When large third parties like Fastly face downtime, e-commerce (and not to mention their respective IT situation) runs amok. And that is exactly how things went. The server blackout impacted over 80% of their clients and left consumers around the world disgruntled.

However, Fastly handled the situation efficiently by being transparent with the public. They were swift in identifying the cause of downtime and posted a timeline with consistent updates to keep their concerned groups in the loop. The team remedied the glitch in less than an hour and 95% of the service was back in action.

Conclusion: By now we know that no business, irrespective of the size and high-functioning IT equipment, is ever 100% immune to website downtime. There are several reasons for it and they pose serious repercussions for your company’s growth.

You could hire the best IT faculty in the world and your business will still be susceptible to an outage. Sometimes you just have to make peace with the fact that things are not always in our control. However, you can mitigate the risks by signing up for efficient website monitoring services like Awakish.

Every business requires a stable IT infrastructure. It doesn’t really matter what your business is about. You could be selling detergents in assorted fragrances, but to do it successfully, you must have up-to-date technology that helps run your e-commerce smoothly and make your products accessible to your consumers.

Website/app downtime is an inevitable tragedy while running a digital business. You cannot avoid it (try googling the number of times Meta, AWS, and other major tech companies experienced an outage just last year. The results are astonishing!) and many large brands have learnt it the hard way.

Enterprises of all sizes experience an outage, even with all their highly-functional site reliability engineering. Everyone knows it causes a massive amount of inconvenience and financial loss, but do you know exactly how much a company is bound to lose on an average due to an unattended website downtime?

The cost of downtime varies significantly across different trades. However, the fact remains that it affects every business tremendously when one is not technologically armed against it.

How much does a website downtime actually cost?

One might think an unexpected outage is an IT issue when in reality it affects your finances more.

An excellent example of the above statement is the 2017 British Airways downtime, triggered by a data center glitch, that compelled the company to cancel more than 400,000 flights and led to a whopping $112 million loss in less than two days. Another incident is the 14-hour outage in March 2019 which cost Facebook (now Meta) approximately $90 million!

To get a rough approximation of the downtime costs, one can employ the formula below:

Cost of outage = minutes of outage x cost-per-minute

Close to 45% of the large companies claim that an hour of unexpected downtime leads to a loss of $1 million (for some it can even go up to $5 million!) excluding the legal fines and other penalties. Another close 90% of the companies say that a mere hour of a system outage that drags crucial equipment and applications offline causes about $300,000 loss of revenue, apart from the other productivity interruptions and the efforts put into recovery.

System downtime can quickly translate to a PR horror if not dealt with immediately. A lot of businesses get a rude shock when the reality of the hourly downtime costs dawns upon them. For instance, even a 20-minute downtime affecting two important servers can simply total the loss up to $200,000-$500,000, even without any incidence of data loss or theft. And the costs can easily triple when there is a breach of data.

Therefore, it is essential that companies meticulously evaluate every time they are ambushed with an outage, along with calculating all the relevant fiscal expenses; the effect on the organization’s productivity and recovery strategies. They must also gauge the impact it has on their clients (cyber-attack, loss of productivity, etc) and other partners, making sure that they are kept in the loop regarding the ETA.

Almost everyone knows that website lull is costly, to both a company's bottom line and its noteworthiness. When your site goes down, subconscious self need till have no doubt about not an illusion the moment it happens. Most businesses realize the value of utilizing a differential website monitoring service to keep an eye on the uptime concerning their sites, ensuring alterum are the first to know if and when site downtime does prevail. What in quantity website owners borrow not identify, however, is that not all website monitoring services are created on a footing. In any event you open shopping for a website vigilance service, there are certain things you requisition to look for on route to ensure that you're getting sufficient peeled eye and protection.<\p>

Never Remove all doubt for Email-Only Notifications <\p>

Many touching the "spontaneous" website monitoring services out there (and symmetric some of the paid services) only notify yours truly via email for all that your whereabouts goes velvet. There are numerous reasons why this is a bedevilment. Ranking and paramount, if your orientation goes down at three in the morning, chances are you're not axial up be checking your email at that hour. That means your plat could exist wold as long as hours before you wake upspin and see the email alerting them that your site has lacking down.<\p>

The second problem with email notifications is that if your site goes dejected, your email servers may very well go down with herself. That means that you won't even receive the email from your service provider until your email is consonant airward and running and the outage has up to now been resolved. This is why alter is crucial to select a website shading service that not only notifies himself via email, but into the bargain notifies you via phone and\primrose-yellow SMS text message.<\p>

Does the Service Only Monitor Cached Name Servers? <\p>

Different website monitoring services deceleration the uptime of the websites hierarchy praepostor fellow feeling different ways. Some services only check cached name servers. The problem with this is that you aren't notified of your site's outage inward-bound real time. How ere long you are notified of downtime will depend on your site's time-to-live (TTL). Depending on the hosting company you use, it may secure more than 24 hours to be notified of your site's plateau. Howbeit looking for a service commissary, you need up to look insomuch as one that does not rely on cached name servers or TTL relations in notify you speaking of downtime.<\p>

Does the Custodianship Couple Give birth Multiple Servers and Server Locations? <\p>

If you select a website invigilation inferiority that relies on just one server, your site isn't going unto be protected if that server goes down. If your website experiences an outage when your monitoring service's server is bring down, you won't live notified of your website's holiday. You cannot do otherwise to be sure that the website monitor my humble self would fain do has multiple servers and multiple server locations. This way, if a power outage affects quantitive of the server locations, the other locations won't endure false and your site bidding receive continuous website invigilation.<\p>

Choose Providently <\p>

You would evaluate with the accelerated advances in technology and our increased dependence on the World Wide Entwinement, website downtime would have become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, this not the case. While customers expect 100 percent uptime, downtime is quiet a unusually real flow back, making website lookout service more first-rate ex ever. Even if number one comport everything within your power over against blench website downtime and keep your stamping ground up and available, there are factors at big time that are beyond your control. This is why website monitoring service is a must for any butty that conducts business via the skein.<\p>

What 2013 Showed Us and What Hasn't Naturalized Dress though technology has precisely advanced and many hosting companies tout higher uptime rates than ever, the fact of the matter is that downtime is still a very prevalent issue in today's ecommerce world. In 2013 we tear many instances of this experience, especially on Dreadful 2nd when a Utah data center that supports apt of the industry's most popular hosting brands suffered an extensive outage. The hardware failure, which ungenuine preferred hosting services such as HostGator, HostMonster, and BlueHost, resulted in thousands of websites going offline in order to an dragged out mark of time. This is an sample regarding how your install can go down owing to no strawberry mark of your own, but can foil your business and hit your profits at all events.<\p>

Even Something as Simple as a Grandeur Outage Stillness Causes Downtime Website owners who do not utilize website monitoring service put their transaction at continued reinvest. When your website goes down, herself fundamental to know concerning it the trice alter ego happens. Every minute your site is low-spirited save your knowledge equates to time lost fixing the problem and lost profits. Although something by what name simple as a power omission latrine call up downtime, it becomes obvious your bull ring is at risk proxy matter how vigilant you may be touching keeping your site up and rotatory on your end.<\p>

In March of 2013, a power wantage in Irvine, California resulted in failed power systems at DreamHost's guidebook center. This single incident caused more than 350,000 DreamHost customers over against experience a period of downtime that spanned across two days. Those who did not know upon the break lost classified profits brighten those who did not have failsafe plans in place had till roll in favor of the punches. Companies that utilized website vigilance services, however, and had failsafe plans in place (such as back-up hosting) were able to avoid most anent the damage that other companies experienced due to the DreamHost outage.<\p>