Having your website go down is not only frustrating to you, it can also be an inconvenience for your visitors and customers. Most of us aren’t on our sites all day long in order to know when it is down and how often it happens. Fortunately there are a number of tools and online services to accomplish this task for you. There are some basic free tools that will get the job done for most of us who simply want to know the status of our website. However, there are also much more advanced services for larger companies that may want to track downtime for all of their systems. We’ll take a look at several of the options.
AlertSite
AlertSite offers a variety of products, including website performance monitoring. With their service you’ll not only be able to track downtime, but you’ll also get a variety of reports on the performance of your site from different spots around the world. There is a 30 day free trial for this service, but the price after the free trial is not listed.
Pingdom
Pingdom provides their basic service for $9.95 per month. They monitor your site from every continent, and of course you’ll receive notifications of any problems. Pingdom also provides some nice, easy to understand reports to look at the data they gather. They also offer a 30 day free trial.
Alertra
Alertra claims to detect outages quicker and more effectively than any other monitoring service. They have monitoring stations set up throughout the world and you can set the time interval that you want your website to be checked. Their prices vary greatly depending on exactly what you want, but there is a minimum monthly charge of $7.50. They also offer a 30 day free trial.
Dot-Com Monitor
Dot-Com Monitor offers website monitoring and network monitoring. The website monitoring service includes certificate verification, content check, accessibility check, performance check, cookie support, and more. Services start at $9.99 per month and go up from there. They also offer a 30 day free trial.
Uptime Auditor
Uptime Auditor also offers some different option in terms of how frequently you want your website to be checked and the number of sites you want to monitor. Prices start at $7 per month for monitoring up to 3 websites in 5 minute intervals.
NetworkSolutions WatchDog
WatchDog will do much more than just monitor your site’s downtime. It will provide you with security scanning to check for vulnerability to hackers. The performance monitoring services will watch your website around the clock and notify you when something is not right. The price for WatchDog is $17.95 per month.
Internet Supervision
Internet Supervision offers a free website monitoring service, plus several different paid options. With the free service your site will be checked every 15 minutes for the first 90 days and every 24 hours after 90 days. To get the free service you’ll also have to link to their site from yours. The paid plans start for as little as $2.95 per month.
Montastic
Montastic is a free service that offers basic monitoring. If you’re just getting started with monitoring your site and not completely sure what your needs are, Montastic is a safe place to start. For businesses that depend on their website to make sales and communicate with customers, a more complex option might be preferred. Montastic will check your site every 10 minutes and there are no stupid requirements like making you link back to them.
Mon.itor.us
Mon.itor.us is another nice choice if you’re looking for a free service. Get instant alerts and reports on your site’s performance, plus they also offer website statistics on your visitors.
Have You Used Any of These?
If you have any experience with any of these services (or other similar services) please take a minute to share your thoughts in the comments.
May 5th, 2008
I use alerta for the last few yrs on my servers.. it’s been great.. no complaints.
May 5th, 2008
If you have multiple servers, it would make more sense to just get another server and install nagios on it to monitor your servers. It is free, aside from the extra server cost, and it won’t start firing off tickets at you host with just a little bit of packet loss or latency like most of these do.
May 5th, 2008
I use Pingdom - and its been great. Twice I had site go down for a short time and I could call folks that might have been reviewing their photos to keep them up to date.
May 5th, 2008
@Shanna I also use alerta on my sites and it has been a great tool. There are some other great options on that list as well. I would love to hear from others that have used some different one also.
Great List!! Cheers
May 6th, 2008
I think I was waiting for something like this.The downtime monitoring is very tough job.
May 6th, 2008
If this thing really works then it is a very cool process to record downtime.Thanks for the informaton.It surely help.
May 6th, 2008
Though the job is boring but the service is very necessary for all. So the salary should be higher.
May 7th, 2008
[...] | Vandelay Design | [...]
May 7th, 2008
i don’t know any of these websites and never think about this type of service
May 7th, 2008
Thanks for the list of services. I needed this kind of service since my hosting provider does not seem to be reliable enough.
May 9th, 2008
I can’t agree with the poker. It is very important to find out which people are really liking and who are coming regularly. You can find a person who make comments very few but read daily can give you much pleasure. Not only the comments. And there are also some other reasons that you can find out if you try to find.
May 9th, 2008
I’m a big fan of ipPatrol. It isn’t free, but highly customisable.
May 13th, 2008
Yes, such services are very useful. Nikola, you can choose the hosting provider who has the percent of downtime in the contract. I think it can help.
May 19th, 2008
Thats great.You provide a very useful info to us.At least we can make a compare which is the best programs to us.
January 18th, 2009
I use http://www.Webserviceguard.com. Very reliable service!
February 21st, 2009
Monitoring uptime is so impotent I used to use a cheap host who would go off-line for no apparent reason. Ok if your off-line for an hour a month you may think no big shakes , but the problem is when you are spiderd and no site is up, you can expect your serps to drop
March 27th, 2009
Lots of people like the free service atbasicstate.com
At least that’s what they say in their emails
April 19th, 2009
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?
May 1st, 2009
Hello people,
I have one another solution, why not try to reduce your costly downtime, get instant alerts as soon as your website is unreachable or faces downtime. APlusMonitoring (www.aplusmonitoring.com) is a solution for your whole company. The service monitors your website, server availability and performance externally from its worldwide network of monitoring locations, 24/7 and every day of the year. When your website or network fails to respond, we notify you instantly via Email, SMS/Text Messaging, RSS so that you can hit the right chord at the right time and fix them before it costs you money, customers or reputation.
I personally am using the paid service from aplusmonitoring.com, the price range here are very much affordable.. it also provides free lifetime service with 1 hour interval, all you have to do is register on the website.
I would recomend you must try it.