Hi all,
Do people have any recommendations for a website availability monitoring service? That is, I’d like a service that checks my site regularly, say every 5 minutes, and then calls my cellphone /txts-me if it ever goes down.
Googling around turns up a sizable number of places that do this. But, I’d like to make I’m going with somebody who’s reasonably good.
-Dan
I haven’t used a paid service for this but I have tried out a number of the free hourly monitoring services. One thing I have noticed is that with several different monitoring services doing the monitoring at the same time that they seldom agree as to when the site has gone down. I have even had reports of my site being down for several hours while I was actually accessing the site myself a lot of the time the service said it was down.
The problem is that most services operate from one location and therefore are reporting on the connectivity to your site from that location rather than on whether your site is actually down or not.
You might want to see if any of them mention how they resolve that issue.
One thing I have noticed is that with several different monitoring services doing the monitoring at the same time that they seldom agree as to when the site has gone down.
Agreed, noticed the same thing.
I’ve used some time ago Pingdom (special free trial) for 1 year, and it was without doubt significantly better than the free monitors.
unialert and logicreach would be two free uptime monitors that do checks more often than hourly.
You may also consider monitis - not expensive but has more protocols and features.
I’ve extensively tested six online website monitoring services (a couple of which are above) and found three to provide reasonably good offerings - Wormly, Site24x7 and Pingability. Most of these services offer notification via email, phone, sms, twitter and IM. Here are the results
Website Montoring Services: Review »
If you have any other suggestions, I am very happy to receive feedback about the article.
Good luck
Justin
I use serverstatus.co.uk at the moment - but would NOT recommend it. The monitoring works fine (they use multiple locations), but their main site frequently goes down. So your publicly visible uptime record might often be down. Not good if you want to proudly boast about having good uptime!
Considering switching to pingdom.com - have been using their free service (GIGRIB) http://uptime.pingdom.com/ - and so far it works flawlessly.
I like the free tools that pingdom make available too - http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
There are several sites that offers website monitoring service out of which I suggest http://100pulse.com, the best kind of it I used. It monitors website for free with 5 mins interval. Checks website availability and performance. Instant email alerts whenever the site goes down are unavailable.
Hope this helps!
I’ve used Observe Point for my monitoring services. They are faily reliable-emailing/calling/texting me if something goes wrong. Their reports are easy to read and show me what I need to know without being vluttered with stuff I don’t understand. Website monitoring has never been so easy for me.
Personally, I would suggest Website Monitoring from SITEIMPULSE.
But you can make your own decision with this little help: 15 website monitoring services compared.
Cheers,
I know that you’re talking about a third party monitoring service, and not hosting your own monitoring software, but it is worth considering:
Why not go with a VPS, and install Nagios? That way, it would be completely customized to your specifications. Plus, a VPS instance is about the same cost as some of the monitoring services mentioned. Nagios has an easy to use GUI interface (once configured). Nagios supports SMS messaging, email notifications, as well as basically any custom command alerts.
I would recommend you 100pulse, a free monitoring service with lots of best features
We recently switched to BrowserMob for our uptime testing. It is rocking awesome, and you can test lots of stuff typical services can’t even approach. Like AJAX.
Pingdom is definitely one of the most popular. I have also used Hyperspin, and had a good experience with it.
Good luck in your decision making!
– benny
I would second this - it’s one of the very few cheap providers that handles cellphone notifications. We’re very happy with Monitis so far.