Monitoring services can't assure you that your site will be financially successful, but they will help you maximize quality, which is vital to any successful web site and web strategy.

Listed below is a checklist of things to consider when selecting and purchasing online monitoring services.

1.How is service provider connected to Internet? 2.How reliable is monitoring services? Is it truly 24 x 7? 3.Is this their core business or is it an add-on to other web based services? 4.Call or email their customer service and see how quickly they respond. 5.Does service monitor overall performance or just up/down? 6.Does service reliably identify most site problems? How do you know? 7.Are alerts and reports accurate and timely? 8.Does service provide enough real information to debug site problem? 9.Can you afford to subscribe to an online monitoring system? Can you afford not to?

Go into a site called Tucows at , where you'll find almost everything under sun that any computer buff could want. When you get into Tucows, in first screen, click on Win 95/98, or Mac, whatever your system is. In second screen, click on your region, general; and in third screen, on your region local. This will take you to fourth screen where you find box: NETWORK TOOLS, and here you click on FTP ARCHIE. This will take you into final screen, where you will scroll down to very last item on page: which is WS-FTP PRO 6.5, and download it. This may take about fifteen minutes. After down loading, you will find two little yellow icons on your desktop.

Double click on top one, FTP-pro, not FTP-explorer. When you open FTP engine, fill in boxes with your server address, your user name and password, and then click on QUICK CONNECT. This will bring up a split screen. What is on left side of screen, is what is on your hard drive, and what is on right screen, is what is on your site.

To upload, in left hand box, choose your web page file in whatever drive it's in, click and open it. You will see two entries for web pages you have just designed. Hi-light first one, and then in middle of two screens, where you see two arrows, one pointing left and one pointing right, click on one pointing right and this will upload your page to your site. Follow through same way for second page, and your site is up!

This is a very, very basic step by step, and there is a whole lot more to learn, but I know that I would have liked to read something like this when I was starting out back in July. Good luck!