Watch your website's uptime with free monitors

Its inevitable - your website will experience downtime. All hosts, regardless of price, technology, or quality, will experience downtime. Site downtime is a bad thing because if your customers can't get to your site, they can't send you their money. No monies = sad business.

But website owners don't need to worry about your site being down without you knowing. There are a few options out there that will periodically check your site and send you a message (via email or text message, depending on your preferences) if anything is wrong. These services are great because if you are proactively notified that something is wrong, you can take action before it negatively impacts your business.

Pingdom

Pingdom includes options to test DNS, email, or check for normal HTTP responses from one minute to 60 minute intervals. The great feature of Pingdom is that when a problem is detected, error analysis is performed to help you troubleshoot the error. They will record traceroute information to help find network problems, response information from the server, and DNS lookup checking. All this information is recorded in an error log that lets you see your website's performance over time.

Normally a paid service starting at $9.95/month for up to 5 sites, Pingdom recently added a free plan for monitoring one site.

Are My Sites Up?

Are My Sites Up? is the service Two Trees Media uses to monitor its web properties. The service reports if your site is either up or down, with very little information to aid in troubleshooting. Their interface is super simple to use with fewer options, making the service perfect for power users that just need to know if one of their many sites is working. Notifications can be sent via email or SMS text message.

Are My Sites Up? has a free service that lets you check up to 5 sites at 60 minute intervals. Paid plans start at $35/year for 25 sites and 30 minute status checks.