Imagine your business as a typical brick and mortar establishment. Every day someone needs to turn on the lights and open the doors. As the staff comes in to do their work you need to make sure they have the tools they need and the supplies required. When customers enter it's important that they are given a friendly greeting and assisted with finding what they need via an easy avenue for purchase and swift delivery. You wouldn't dream of opening a storefront without taking these steps, and having a manager to make sure they were being done. With that example in mind, who is managing your online business?

Anyone with an online business can sit back and peruse sales reports and read emails from satisfied and dissatisfied customers. From the comfort of your home you can click your way through your site and - if you have the time - click every link and test every feature. Though that only tells you that things are working properly at that moment in time. Who is looking after your employees' needs and your customers' desires when problems occur while you are doing other things, out to dinner or in the middle of the night while you are asleep?

These moments are when you'll be thankful that you invested in a managed web hosting company with robust web monitoring services. Any web host can claim to be watching your servers all the time, but only those who provide documented and verifiable web monitoring features can let you rest comfortably at night. There are numerous variations of web monitoring softwares out there so it's best to take some time to familiarize yourself with those which would suit you best, or better yet, ask your web hosting provider to give you the detailed information on those services they recommend.

Making sure your site is monitored from multiple locations is a good indication of the quality of the web monitoring services offered by your prospective web host. Based on how much traffic your site usually experiences in peak time should give you a good starting point for setting the frequency of your web monitoring needs. Just like a brick and mortar business, the busier your website is, the more frequently your virtual ‘manager' needs to pop in and check that all the components are working properly. This is especially important if you have a high volume site dealing with a variety of financial transactions. The failure of one transaction method could severely impact your sales conversions, but it might be missed in a casual, manual check of your website's functionality.

Fortunately web hosting companies are acutely aware of the importance of high quality web monitoring, and those that specialize in these services will be more than happy to explain their capabilities with you and be equally willing to spend the time establishing the necessary protocols to keep your site running and your customers happy. If your hosting provider is hesitant to discuss monitoring with you or dismisses your concerns out of hand it might be a good indication that the provider you are with is not the right one for you and your business.

Don't hesitate to change web hosting companies if your current provider is not willing or able to offer the type of high quality web hosting your business needs. There are a huge number of capable and qualified web server hosting companies who make it their business to keep your site up and functioning - find the one who suits your business best and stick with them.

Remember, when something goes wrong with your site it may not be your hosting provider who'll be losing sleep at night – but it will be you!