At some point, most business are going to need to have some help from a IT consultant. Maybe your business is a small, without many IT resources. Maybe your company is larger, with a significant resources in IT already, and just needs a healthy dose of outside perspective. Whatever the reason, it can be difficult to choose an IT consultant, especially if you aren’t a technical person.

I’ve heard stories about selecting consultants from all sorts of people. Quite a few have told me heard horror stories about how they wound up with large bills and little or nothing to show for it. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be hard to choose an IT consultant, because I’ve the knowledge I’ve accrued to create some guidelines you can use in choosing your IT consultant.

* A Contract Programmer or an IT Consultant?

There are quite a few contract programmers out there masquerading as IT consultants. A real IT consultant isn’t in the business of writing code; rather, he’s in the business of solving problems, and code just happens to be one of the way that he (or she) does it. Conversely, a contract programmer will want you to spell out exactly what kind of program you want him to write. He doesn’t solve problems; he just writes code the way he’s told, and hopes it will fix the problem at hand. With a real IT consultant, you wind up with a solution that leaves everyone happy.

* Focus on benefits, not technology.

Some IT consultants can get wrapped up in their technology; it’s not uncommon to see consultants who specializes in “AS/400 mainframes” or “embedded systems”, for example. A real IT consultant, though, focuses on benefiting his client, using whatever technology is necessary, rather than on what technology he’s familar with. You want to hire someone that’s skilled at solving problems, and that will use the technology that’s best suited to your business, whatever it may be. You shouldn’t have to pick a consultant based on what technology he’s familar with; he should be able to take care of almost any technological problem, either by doing the work himself or outsourcing to someone in his network of contacts.

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In the real world, businesses come in every size, from self-employed entrepreneurs like me to mega malls like Wal-Mart.

On the Internet, companies come in every size, too, from a stand-alone ebook sales page with webmaster and owner all in one, to 300 pound gorilla like Amazon, with over a million pages requiring the entire population of a small country to serve as webmaster.

If your site is a single page, it is its own network. But if your site is any bigger, and you have plans to grow, it is a network or is fast becoming one. You need network monitoring.

Most ecommerce webmasters are at least somewhat familiar with website monitoring. Many use a website monitoring service or software to keep track of “uptime” and “downtime”.

At your local shopping mall, serious business requires more than just knowing when the front doors are open and when they are closed. Serious ecommerce needs to know more than just when the site is accessible. That is what network monitoring is all about.

Chances are, your e-business owns one of the following, or uses one of the following remotely:

DNS servers: These are used to translate your site name, like www.mycompany.com, to the numbers called “IP addresses” that computers understand. If DNS servers are not working properly, end-users will not be able to find your site and will get an error. Usually only an external or remote monitoring service will detect such a problem.

An FTP server: File Transfer Protocol servers are used to help you exchange files with remote users. If you use FTP, a monitoring service can make sure it is always up and running.

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