9 Options for Tracking Downtime
May 5th, 2008Having 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 at 8:56 am
I use alerta for the last few yrs on my servers.. it’s been great.. no complaints.
May 5th, 2008 at 9:24 am
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 at 2:12 pm
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 at 5:06 pm
@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 at 2:00 am
I think I was waiting for something like this.The downtime monitoring is very tough job.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:01 am
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 at 10:11 am
Though the job is boring but the service is very necessary for all. So the salary should be higher.
May 7th, 2008 at 6:00 am
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May 7th, 2008 at 10:22 am
i don’t know any of these websites and never think about this type of service
May 7th, 2008 at 10:33 am
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 at 4:46 am
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 at 6:08 pm
I’m a big fan of ipPatrol. It isn’t free, but highly customisable.