How to monitor website uptime or downtime for free

Posted on November 16, 2007 at 2:24 pm

Need to monitor website downtime or uptime? Just about every webmaster wants to know when and for how long their web site was down in the unfortunate chance that something goes terribly wrong! Depending on your host and how much you’re paying, more than likely you’re on your own when it comes to downtime or uptime monitoring.

A keeps weeks ago my hosting company’s server crashed and I was out of town! I didn’t know my site was down until 36 hours later. Google had dropped all traffic to my site and the number of people subscribed to my feed dropped by 50%! In actuality, it should have only taken about an hour to get back online. So that’s not only lost traffic, but lost ad revenue also!

Of course it’s virtually impossible for any human to monitor a websites’ uptime, so an automated method is required. Luckily, there are some cool web services that are completely free that you can use to monitor the uptime/downtime of your site. Also, using these services, you can be notified immediately on your cell phone or via email that your site has crapped out.

Montastic is a free web site monitoring tool service that “doesn’t suck” as it’s motto states. It’s very easy to setup and works very well. Here are a couple of it’s main features:

Receive an email when your site goes down

Receive an email when it goes back up

Read statuses via RSS in your favorite RSS reader or Yahoo widget

Fun, easy and elegant user interface

You can monitor up to 100 web sites at a time

Montastic checks your web site every 10 minutes as a minimum. They also check the status of your web sites from multiple locations, so in case something goes down in one, your site will still be monitored.

Another very interesting and cool tool you can use to monitor your website is a service called YouMonitor. Basically, YouMonitor is a peer-to-peer web monitoring service that uses CPU cycles on your server to monitor other websites, while other sites signed up keep an eye on yours. The service is completely free, but you have to give up a few CPU cycles and bandwidth in order to monitor the other sites. However, you will receive instant notifications via email or SMS if your site is down.

The service works very simply: you install a script onto your server (PHP, ASP, JSP, or Perl) and the script will ping other sites up to 10 times per minute. You’ll be pinged about 5 times per minute by other web sites with the script.

According to the site, the processor utilization is very minimal equal to about only 10 page views per minute.

Currently the service is free for everyone and requires that you give out some of your server resources to monitor the site. However, later one they will offer plans whereby you can be monitored and not have to shell out any of your bandwidth or CPU.

The service is very cool in it’s concept and according to the site, they already have monitoring from all inhabited continents, so your site will not only be checked by a server in the US, but from everywhere in the world. Neat! Source ReadWriteWeb

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5 Responses to “How to monitor website uptime or downtime for free”

Arun said on : November 23rd, 2007 at 3:58 am

You may also try Site24×7.com - website monitoring service. It offers a free as well as paid plans.

Hovhannes said on : January 8th, 2008 at 12:31 pm

http://mon.itor.us - completely free and very powerful website monitoring service

spenser said on : March 12th, 2009 at 3:01 am

The field has changed since 2007.

basicstate.com has become very popular in the last two years.

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[...] Tech Tips - How To Monitor Website Uptime Or Downtime For Free Need to monitor website downtime or uptime? Just about every webmaster wants to know when and for [...]
November 18th, 2007 at 10:01 am
5 tools to monitor website uptime Says:

[...] I wrote on Online Tech Tips about two services you could use to monitor website uptime or downtime, but both services are free and don’t have the best features, etc that you could get with a paid [...]
December 2nd, 2008 at 5:24 am