Custom Website Design

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.