Is your site LIVE? FREE website monitoring sites
Keep a check on whether your website is live with these free and paid for tools.
You don’t want to check your website every 5 minutes to see if it’s live. That’s why there’s a number of websites that do it for you. They’ll check, at set intervals, and inform you when your site’s down. You can then get in touch with your hosting provider to see what the problem is and when your site will be back up and running.
Most offer a free plan, along with paid plans, that offer a basic website monitoring service – which should be enough for most small sites. If you rely on your website for sales and it’s vital that it’s live 100% of the time then it’s worth having a paid subscription which will have far more options available to you such as receiving notifications via SMS.
It’s often the case that if your website is down then your email will be as well so use an email address not associated with the site you’re checking. A Gmail or Yahoo Mail address is ideal.
A few websites that offer free services are:
Pingdom: Without a doubt my favourite and also the most reliable, giving minute by minute tracking of your site as well as detailed stats via their site. You can receive notifications via email, sms and now even Twitter! You’ll also receive monthly emails with details of how long your site has been up for. Free for monitoring one site and then pay for more.
HostTracker: The free version checks up to 2 domains at 30 minute intervals. You’ll also receive weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly reports. The reports are very detailed and specifies how long, if any, your site was down for each day.
SiteUptime: The free version only tracks 1 domain at 30 minute intervals. Also receive a monthly report which is very basic giving downtime in hours, uptime in percentage and the amount of outages.
Montastic: You can have up to 100 domains checked at 10 minute intervals for free. It’ll inform you when your site is down and then send a follow-up email to say when it’s up again. Extras include a free widget for both Mac and PC and RSS feed that will update when your site goes down.
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