Ravi Saive: A Technology Blog For Newbies

It’s crucial for every site owner to monitor website uptime, otherwise visitors won't come back again if the site is always unavailable. If it is high traffic website then it becomes more critical to monitor website up-time, because we cannot monitor website all the time. Sometimes it happens that websites are going down even if we have a very reliable hosting provider with 99% of uptime. The reason could be with network outages, data center, server outages, server overload, DNS configuration, or SSL certificate problems. In this case we should be aware of such things, otherwise we could lose royal visitors and followers, if website is down for hours (or days).

There are some good free and paid online web services tools available that checks your website availability time to time and notify you via Email or SMS whenever the website is down or not responding. With the help of these uptime monitoring services you can always get notified about the status of your website.

Here are 10 Website Monitoring tools (including free and paid) that would help you to monitor the availability and accessibility of your website.

1. Pingdom

Pingdom is a free and paid service that tracks the uptime, downtime, and performance of websites and alerts you via email, SMS, or Twitter whenever they are stopped working. It also keeps a track of your website errors for the lifetime of your account, giving you the ability to view detailed reports about website downtime, response time and load time in an instant.

The free service only allows you to monitor one site and includes 20 SMS alerts and I think it's worthy because it comes with a free iPhone app gives you a handy on-the-go solution for monitoring your website’s status.

1. Monitor 1 sites/servers
2. 20 SMS alerts on signup
3. Unlimited email & twitter alerts
4. Unlimited contacts

2. Basic State

Basic State is a free service that monitors your website uptime every 15 minutes 24x7. It instantly alerts you by email or SMS. BasicState allows you to monitor unlimited number of websites. The uptime checks are made by multiple ways: DNS, Network, HTTP response, IP blacklist, Domain blacklist and more.

1. checks your websites every 15 minutes
2. get trouble alerts by email or sms
3. daily uptime report with 14 day history

3. mon.itor.us

mon.itor.us provides free all-in-one web application monitoring service with personalized interactive interface for website owners, web developers, webmasters, system administrators and IT operations. It has an intuitive AJAX based dashboard GUI, the ability to send you downtime alerts by Email, SMS and RSS. The monitoring performed from geographical locations, and real-time visitor monitoring. mon.itor.us also offers different web protocols monitoring.

1. Number of Sites you can Monitor: Unlimited
2. Regularity of Checks: Every 30 minutes
3. Methods of Alerts: IM, SMS, E-mail, RSS

4. InternetSeer

InternetSeer claims to be the world’s largest website monitoring service with over 2.2 million websites worldwide. InternetSeer monitoring service remotely checks your website from several geographic monitoring locations at selected intervals. If the monitoring service is unable to reach the site, its sends you an alerts via an email, cell phone or pager. Some of the key web site monitoring services available include Availability Monitoring, Performance Monitoring, Link and Image Checking, Transaction Monitoring, Historical and Detailed Check and Alert Reporting.

1. Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1
2. Regularity of Checks: Every hour
3. Methods of Alerts: E-mail, SMS, pager

5. Montastic

Montastic is a free website monitoring service that doesn’t suck. With Montastic website monitoring tool whenever your site crashes (and when it comes back up) it sends an instant alerts via email, RSS, or their Windows and Mac widget. Montastic free service lets you monitor up to 3 sites per account, supports monitoring for HTTP and HTTP Secure connections, and a simple and elegant end-user interface. Montastic checks your website status at least every 30 minutes from two different locations.

1. Number of Sites you can Monitor: 3
2. Regularity of Checks: Every 30 minutes
3. Methods of Alerts: Email or SMS

6. Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot is a free service that will monitor your website's uptime every 5 minutes. It offers you to add up to 50 websites to monitor and whenever a website becomes offline, it will sends an alerts via e-mail, SMS, RSS, Twitter or push notifications.

1. Number of Sites you can Monitor: 50
2. Regularity of Checks: Every 5 minutes
3. Methods of Alerts: E-mail, SMS, RSS, Twitter

7. SiteUptime

SiteUptime is a website monitoring service that monitors your website status at regular intervals and alerts you via email or SMS if more than one location detects a connection failure. In free version you can monitor only 1 website for every 30 or 60 minutes. SiteUptime also sends you free uptime report monthly. Monitoring options include: HTTP, POP3, SMTP, FTP, SSL, DNS, custom TCP Ports, ping, HTTP Password Protection.

1. Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1
2. Regularity of Checks: Every 30 or 60 minutes
3. Methods of Alerts: E-mail or SMS

8. Are My Sites Up?

Are My Sites Up? free plan will allow you to monitor up to 5 websites for 25 times per day. You get unlimited email and SMS notifications with the reason why your site went down (including HTML status error codes).

1. Number of Sites you can Monitor: 5
2. Regularity of Checks: 25 times a day
3. Methods of Alerts: E-mail or SMS

9. Uptime Dog

Uptime Dog is a free website monitoring service that will check availability of your website every 2 minutes from two different geographical locations and once found unresponsive response to both monitoring servers, it will send an email notification to you instantly. The main drawback of this service is that you need to add the HTML link to their site.

1. Number of Sites you can Monitor: unlimited
2. Regularity of Checks: Every 2 minutues
3. Methods of Alerts: E-mail or SMS

10. Root Internet

Root Internet offers multi-protocol support, uptime and performance of your website or server, downtime alerts via email and SMS, global monitoring locations. With “Live Status Report” widget you can easily display an uptime report on your website. You can define maintenance windows so that Root Internet pauses monitoring during those periods or simply exclude them from uptime reporting. Root Internet can import the uptime history into your account for free, making the switch easy and painless.

1. Number of Sites you can Monitor: unlimited
2. Regularity of Checks: Every 2 minutues
3. Methods of Alerts: E-mail or SMS

Your Say

Please share your thoughts an opinions about these featured tools here with me and also tell me what tool you used to monitor uptime of your websites? Please do share with me in the comments.