When a website is down, it’s always painful. For sales companies, they are missing out on sales; for bloggers, we are losing out on revenue from advertising; and other sites can lose potential customers when a site goes down. On top of that, website downtime is bad for SEO (search engine optimization). Using inadequate web servers for a website is one of the most common reasons that websites see a lot of downtime.
It’s easy to lose a potential client, or even an important current client, simply because something doesn’t work on your website that they want or need. And many times when your site goes down, you do not find out right away. Being caught off-guard with something like that, especially when you find out from an angry client, is not good.
If you own a website and have experienced this issue, or simply want to avoid ever experiencing it, then read on. In a world where the Internet is a necessity for many companies to make money, one cannot afford to have their website down for any amount of time.
Now, it is well understood that business people, or even their IT guys, cannot spend all day sitting in front of the computer monitoring your website. So, let’s talk about how we are able to solve these problems. In fact, there are products on the market that will monitor your website and notify you when your site goes down. Even if you cannot afford an expensive system, know that there are many free systems out there as well. Most of these are simple to setup, and can be done in little time.
Here are three of the best free services to help you:
Monitor.us
This system was created in 2006, and was the world’s first IT tool that was an all-in-one, and is also cloud based. To date, this is easily one of the best tools for website monitoring, this service monitoring uptimes. This service is great, as it is innovative, usable, and up-to-date with its technology. Here are a few of the advantages that www.Monitor.us offers users:
- This service is free to users, and offers great quality in spite of that. This is possible because it is supported by advertisements.
- Registration is simple, requiring you to simply click the link on the top right of the site. This will send you to the area explaining the process and policies.
- Customer service is great, giving you online help and usability, quickly. This can help you with navigation issues, the design of the system, and how it works. Once you understand it, you will grow to love it in no time.
- Many sites can be monitored, including ecommerce, forums, personal sites, blogs, travel sites, portals, and press releases.
- Downtime alerts can be received via SMS, email, voice, Twitter, or IM.
- End-to-end monitoring is provided. This means that you as the user can also monitor how your server is acting at various times and under various loads.
- All types of monitors are supported, including: HTTPS, SMTP, HTTP, POP3, FTP, SSH, PING, TCP, SIP, 404, MySQL, and DNS. Internal monitors suchs as RAM, HDD, CPU, and server load can also be monitored.
- Www.Monitor.us is the world’s only cloud-based all-in-one website monitoring service.
- Developers can also use this service to create add-ons.
- Alexa Rank, which determines how much traffic a site receives in relation to other sites- 77,723.
UpTime Robot
Although this is a recent product, one which came out in January 2012, it is a simple and professional way to monitor your website. One of its coolest features is its ability to monitor even sites that are password protected. Here are a few other of UpTime Robot’s cool features:
- All of UpTime Robot’s services are free; there have been no mentions of premium services.
- This service is efficient, and easy to use.
- Navigation is easy, and most of the relevant information is easily spotted on the homepage.
- It’s design is simple but professional.
- Up to 50 websites can be monitored at once.
- Every five minutes it checks for downtime; this ensures that you will be notified quickly if there are issues. It even uses many different methods of checking, such as checking headers and status codes. It also saves the data in case you want to analyze it later.
- If a site goes down, once it is put back up, UpTime Robot will instantly begin to log information, including how long the site was down.
- Users can be notified via RSS, SMS, Twitter, or email of downed websites. These are also all available on mobile devices as well.
- Some of the various data that is logged includes port 80 HTTP; keyword checking, if applicable; TCP ports, such as MySQL; and pings, which if not responded to, you the user will be notified.
- This service has been specialized to focus on website monitoring, making it more efficient, as well as the ability to provide better customer service, than more generalized companies.
- Registration is simple, requiring only a name, email, and password. Users will have to do an email verification, and then they can start using this simple service.
- Issues- This service is very limited geographically, only monitoring in three areas of the US.
MonitorOnly.com
This service was created by www.WebContentSecurity.com, and is a little different from the other two mentioned. Those two were both based on the web and notify you when your site goes down, whereas www.monitoronly.com is a mobile app-only service, and monitors only uptimes. Here are a few of its features.
- All of its services are free.
- Monitoring is done 24/7.
- Registration is easy and quick.
- No server is required to be installed on your system.
- Alerts can be sent through email or SMS, and can also be put on snooze in case the site is being maintained.
- This service can also monitor your response times.
- Reports can be created to allow you to analyze your times.
- Users can request graphs to be made to visualize your data.
- Works for both iPhone and Android.
There are other great monitoring websites out there that are not discussed here, including PingDom, Code Guard, Site24X7, and downforeveryoneorjustme, then let me clarify my purpose here. I am simply talking about services that offer website uptime data and are free.
Users can use these services in a variety of ways, including using all three, or just one or two in any combination. For users with WordPress sites, Managewp is a great service to give you notifications for downtimes.
So try out the various sites and find the combination that works for you. This time spent will help you save money from downed websites.
