It is very important to monitor the uptime performance of a website or blog. The target of such monitoring is to be notified as soon as the website goes down, and immediately take remedial actions to correct it.
Many people are not aware that there are some really good free website monitoring services. These check your website at pre-defined intervals, and alert you (via email, SMS, or RSS) when your website goes down. You do not need to download or install any software to use these services. Simply create a free account, and specify the URL that you want to be monitored.
Here are 10 Best Free Website Uptime Monitoring Services:
1. Pingdom: This one is the most popular service, and my personal favorite.
Set up the monitoring frequency to any chosen interval. The interval can be as small as 1 minute. This means that Pingdom would check your website after every 1 minute, and will alert you as soon as your website goes down.
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- It sends alerts via Email and SMS.
- Up to 20 SMS alerts are free. Email alerts are completely free.
- Good reporting features.
- Public version of reports available that you can share with anyone.
- Allows only 1 website to be monitored for each Free account.
2. Mon.Itor.US: This is another good service. Before I switched to Pingdom, this is the service I was using.
- The lowest monitoring interval is 30 minutes.
- It sends alerts via Email and RSS.
- Very good reporting features.
3. BasicState: This is another free and very easy to use Website uptime Monitoring Service.
- The lowest monitoring interval is 15 minutes.
- It sends alerts via Email.
- Email alerts can be sent to multiple email accounts.
- Multiple websites can be monitored in a free account.
- Very easy to setup.
4. Service Uptime: This is a popular free website monitoring service. It monitors your website from their worldwide network of monitoring stations.
- The lowest monitoring interval is 30 minutes.
- Sends alerts via email and SMS.
- Get uptime and performance stats.
5. Host-Tracker: This is primarily a paid service, but provides free account as well with basic features:
- Monitoring interval of 30 minutes.
- Only email alerts.
- Uptime reports available.
6. SiteProbe: A basic and easy to use completely free website monitoring service. However, the monitoring interval is pretty large (1 hour).
- Monitoring interval of 1 hour.
- Alerts can be sent to multiple email addresses.
- Has a fail-safe mechanism at its end to ensure it does not sends you false alerts when your website is up.
- You need to login to your account at least once every month, or your account will be deleted!
7. Site24*7: I really liked its well laid out website, and easy setup. However, the monitoring interval is pretty large ( 60 minutes).
- Monitoring interval of 1 hour.
- Email, SMS, and RSS alerts.
- Alerts can be sent to multiple email addresses.
- Nice uptime reports.
- 2 websites can be monitored in each free account.
8. Montastic: Easy to understand website, with very easy setup. It comes with unique widgets that you can install on your Windows or Mac computer to get alerts when your website goes down.
- Monitoring interval of 30 minutes.
- Monitoring done from multiple locations (all in U.S.)
- Email, and RSS alerts.
- Alerts via widgets that can be installed on both Windows as well as Mac.
- A few websites can be monitored in each free account.
9. Uptime Dog: This is a completely free service to monitor your website. It offers a very good monitoring interval of 2 minutes, and checks your website from 2 geographical locations. However, it requires that you add a small HTML link to their website on the website that you will be monitoring.
- Monitoring interval of 2 minutes.
- Email alerts
- Monitoring from 2 geographical locations.
- Needs a HTML link to their website.
10. Easy Site Check: This is another service like Uptime Dog that requires a link to their website. It does offers a good monitoring interval of 15 minutes.
- Monitoring interval of 15 minutes.
- Email alerts.
- Needs a link to their website (if you do not want to put a link, you can choose to pay $12/year).
All these services are pretty good, and can serve needs of all type of websites ranging from personal blogs to commercial websites. If you do not get lot of visitors, you can choose a service with monitoring frequency of 15 minutes or more. If you get a lot of visitors like this site, you want to choose a monitoring service that provides shorter monitoring intervals. Another factor you need to consider is how do you prefer to get alerts. If you do not have access to email all the time, then you would want to choose a service that sends SMS alerts as well.
Are you aware of some other good free website uptime monitoring service? Mention in comments.
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