![]() 6 dollars is a cost comparable to a large coffee from a coffeehouse chain-a monthly subscription of this size won’t significantly deplete the budget of any company.There are two main approaches to web filtering: blacklisting – which implies that a list of malicious or otherwise undesirable sites is made and access blocked accordingly, and whitelisting - an opposite (and stricter) approach to blacklisting which implies creating a list of permitted sites and blocking everything else.Īlso, as the term suggests, a free web filter is one that comes completely free of charge - and usually not for a limited period only. There are nearly 150 suppliers, and each of them offers several pricing plans for businesses of all sizes and with different needs. But paid website monitoring services don’t have to be expensive at all. Inexpensive website monitoring?įree is always the cheapest. One that will detect every failure and malfunction of your website and will notify you immediately-before anyone else notices a problem. But if you run an online business, sell online or provide services through an app, you need a service that you can rely on. If you run a hobby blog, website or forum, and the availability and proper functioning of your website aren’t a critical matter for you, maybe a free monitoring service will be enough for you. Knowing the above deficiencies and limitations, you must decide for yourself whether this solution is good for. Of course, you can’t count on an SLA which is a guaranteed level of service for which you aren’t paying.Ī free service is a tempting option. Regardless of whether and how it will affect your free service. Server resources, transfer, troubleshooting-paying customers will be the first to receive all of these. Your service has the lowest priority-same with all your inquiries and reports. You aren’t paying any money, so don’t expect any guarantees from the monitoring provider. But forget about a voice conversation with a consultant who will help you with configuration. Or differently-support is limited to online help, FAQ and forums. ![]() For this reason, free monitoring usually does not include any support for its users. But human work is even more expensive than server resources. Monitoring websites is quite a “resource-consuming” online service, so providing a free version is always an investment. But then it won’t be a free service any more, right? Limited customer service (or lack thereof) Well, unless you buy an SMS notification package. Thus, free monitoring will only alert you via email. A single SMS isn’t expensive, but once multiplied by thousands of users it gets quite expensive. Fast, reliable, independent of the availability of the Internet, etc. SMS is the ideal communication channel for notifications about failures. Also, it will not notice a sudden slow down of page loading, failure of an important feature, etc. The problem lies in the fact that the server sending the correct response is not synonymous with the fact that the website works correctly-or even that it loads at all! Such a monitoring service will not detect a situation where, instead of a website, a blank white page is displayed-or blank templates with no content are loaded. “404 File Not Found”, “403 Forbidden”) or it will not respond at all, then the monitoring reports an error. If, on the other hand, the server responds with an error message (e.g. If the server responds correctly (“200 OK”), then the monitoring service assumes that everything is OK and the website is working. The basic feature of monitoring services, offered on all free accounts, is to check the availability of the website by retrieving the server’s response. As a result, you may think that the availability of your site monthly or over a longer period is quite good-while it may simply be untrue. What’s more, with such a sparse sampling, monitoring may not “notice” failures lasting, for example, only 4 minutes. This means that you can learn about your site’s failure up to 5 minutes later than your users. Virtually every free monitoring service offers website testing with a frequency of 5 (or more) minutes. Let’s discuss the most important features and limitations that usually distinguish free monitoring services from commercial versions. While a trial account is only available for a few weeks, it provides all the features. This is how a free account differs from a free trial account-it isn’t limited in terms of time, but it provides very limited abilities. Compared to the paid versions, the free one lacks the features that are of utmost importance from the point of view of an online business. The entire structure of a free plan is aimed at maximizing sales. Why does anyone provide free website monitoring at all?
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