Downtime Deterrent: 24/7 Web Monitoring Just Uptime's small web monitoring application makes a big difference to clients like Comply Serve Limited.
By Jennifer Wang •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It's an online company's worst nightmare: The server goes down in the middle of the night and clients on the other side of the world are unable to access the reports and programs they depend on. It could spell disaster. Fortunately, companies with the technical know-how have recognized this and sought to remedy it.
One such company, Just Uptime, will monitor your website and send an alert if your server goes down. To some, this may seem like a minor detail, but for businesses with a strong web presence, these text messages, e-mail notifications and uptime reports can be vital.
The best testament to good service is positive customer reviews, and Just Uptime has such a customer in Comply Serve, a U.K.-based firm founded in 2006 to reduce implementation and ownership costs of compliance management software. The company's current client roster includes major players in highly regulated industries such as transportation and pharmaceuticals, though smaller businesses also benefit from the accessibility of Comply Serve's technical resources.
Terry McMahon, IT manager for Comply Serve, says that employing Just Uptime's monitoring services was essential, especially after the complexities of creating an internal monitoring system became apparent. Because Comply Serve provides web-based software to customers, the company demands a high degree of online availability, he says. "While we pride ourselves on hitting our 99.99 percent availability target, we still need a dependable method of monitoring our various services to alert us of any down time."
McMahon says he also finds Just Uptime's application to be comprehensive, easy to use and affordable. "It takes the pain out of remote monitoring in much the same way that we take the pain out of compliance management," McMahon says. "I particularly like the fact that we can monitor from multiple sites around the world."
Comply Serve has not received any reports of outages since signing on last June, but has received alerts that its website was rebooting every night--a potential concern for clients in other time zones. Without a web monitoring service, McMahon says, it might have gone unnoticed for months.
McMahon has also been impressed by Just Uptime's response time. "Back when we first started using the service, a casual inquiry about the ability to pause monitoring to cope with a maintenance window resulted in the feature appearing within a week or so . [and] it felt like they were listening and responding."
Would Comply Serve recommend the service to others? Absolutely, McMahon says. "Pretty much everyone with a foot in the internet needs what Just Uptime provides."
