A webmasters biggest nightmare is receiving mails from visitors informing that the website is down. A website can be down for many reasons including hardware failure, software issues, security reasons or a power outage.
Most Webhosting companies (even those who claim 99.99% uptime) do not notify you about an unscheduled downtime and if you happen to inform them about the website going down every now and then, here’s a standard answer - ‘It seems there are some routers across the world having an issue and we cannot help as this is third party’. Moreover they fail to acknowledge the mails from your visitors as they are not ‘real-proofs’
So in this scenario, how do you monitor your site’s uptime and get notified, when there’s an issue? Here are 5 Free tools that I suggest to monitor your website uptime for Free. Feel free to use the comments section and suggest any other services that you have used to monitor the uptime of for your websites:
This is one of my favorite uptime monitoring services! It checks your website headers and monitors status codes for errors or timeouts. While most uptime monitoring tools monitor your website after a one hour interval, Uptime Robot monitors your websites every 5 minutes, for FREE.
- Monitors 50 websites
- 5 minutes monitoring frequency
- Alerts via Email, SMS, RSS and Twitter
- Supports websites with SSL certificates as well as self-signed certificates
Once you get started, .mon.itor.us monitors your websites, network devices and more and reports your site outage and response time. The Free Service:
- Monitors unlimited sites
- Checks from USA and Europe
- 30 minutes monitoring frequency
- Alerts via SMS, E-mail, RSS and Instant Messenger
Monstastic, as they put it, is the free website monitoring service that doesn't suck! The Free Service:
100pulse website monitoring checks on your site regularly and monitor websites for downtime and response time. The free uptime monitoring service monitors http services. The Free Service:
- Monitors two sites
- 15 minute – 3 hours (selectable) monitoring frequency
- Alerts via E-mail, RSS, Twitter
- Weekly, Month Periodic Reports
InternetSeer is probably the world's largest website monitoring service. Their monitoring systems remotely check your website from several geographic monitoring stations at selected intervals. If the monitoring system is unable to reach the site, an email, cell phone or pager alert is sent to notify you of the problem. The Free Service:
- Monitors one site
- 60 minute monitoring frequency
- Confirm all alert errors prior to notifying you
- Alerts via E-mail, phone email or pager email
- Weekly Performance Report
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16 comments:
Indeed a good resource to monitor the sites, thanks for sharing Dude.
I run 5 blogs and this is something i was waiting to be spoon-fed. Thanks for the post especially the uptimerobot tool.
Nice list, you also might mention Pingdom...
http://www.pingdom.com/
Satya, Hagi: Thanks for your comments
Elijah: Yes Pingdom looks good. Their free service monitors 1 site.
If you want more control, you can also install http://github.com/adamghill/aeservmonon Google's App Engine. I use it so that I can check that the page has certain content, not just the status code.
Great post! Just went and set Uptime Robot up.
Nice list you have there.
You could also check out http://sentinelmonitoring.com
They do a free trial and let you monitor loads of web based services as well as physical server properties (like disk space, server load etc)
They just started up and we've found them to be extremely good.
They aren't free ($10/month) but definitely one to watch I think.
nice collection of websites, should try it out. I use Site24x7 (www.site24x7.com). Their free service lets me monitor my website and my blog for free.
Take a look at my similar comparison: http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/05/12-free-website-monitoring-services/
Nice collection mate, I will keep track of this for my future reference. Thanks for sharing this to us.
Another site I came around is Uptime Site Monitor. I like very much their quick site tester which has a quick account creation feature.
good collection of websites ..one i would like to share with you is monitorscout, also an extremely reliable monitoring service Expert monitoring in a beta-version and it's FREE
I'd also recommend StatusCake - www.statuscake.com - It's completely free (unlike many so called free services, until you want to use any feature that is useful!), and great plus is that you can add and monitor unlimited number of websites.
Very useful list. I would suggest adding GotSiteMonitor.com to the list. It also gives user 5 free website monitors with 5-minute monitoring interval from multiple monitoring locations.
http://www.monitive.com is another website monitoring service that you should try and could be a great addition to your list mentioned above, I just switched to it from using uptimerobot. Their service is not free like uptimerobot but their service is definitely amazing since they strongly implement reliability and efficiency on their service.
When choosing a site monitoring service, it's important to choose one that monitors your website's content.
I personally use Content Site Monitor. It has a really simple and cool web interface that allows you to view your site’s up-time statistics on a desktop or mobile screen. It’s easy to configure your monitoring parameters as well.
It doesn't just ping your server to make sure that it's alive. It allows you to specify certain content/keywords that you want to monitor and it will send you alert email if the content/keywords are missing from your site. The reason why you need to monitor for certain content/keywords is that your server can be up even after it has been defaced by hackers.
It sends you alert email if there’s any problems with your site. Best of all, it’s free to monitor up to 3 sites!
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