12 Excellent Free Tools for Monitoring Your Site’s Uptime
A website or web application’s high availability is very crucial; users who constantly encounter problems accessing the content of a site will not likely come back. For web applications – poor uptimes means users won’t be confident about your product: if they constantly experience issues with your apps’s availability, they will likely look for another solution that isn’t as problematic.
It’s essential that your sites and web apps are constantly accessible to your users. In this article, you will find free and useful monitoring tools to help you know when your website or web application becomes unavailable.
1. Site24×7
Sites24×7 is a simple website-monitoring tool for keeping track of your website or web application’s availability. It tests your uptime in several global locations such as Singapore, the Netherlands, and New Jersey so that you can be assured that your website is being served in major regions of the world at optimal page load times.
2. Are My Sites Up?
Are My Sites Up? is a straightforward free web tool for being alerted when your websites are down. With Are My Sites Up?, you can monitor up to five different websites, receive email and text message alerts so that you have constant awareness of your sites’ uptime, and checks performed 25 times a day.
3. mon.itor.us
mon.itor.us is a free site monitoring tool with loads of useful features that will help you maintain a high uptime. By providing you with a ton of information about your site and web server, you can quickly spot potential issues that relate with your site’s availability. mon.itor.us has an intuitive dashboard GUI, the ability to send you downtime alerts via email, text message, and RSS, monitoring from multiple geographical locations, and real-time visitor monitoring. It’s a simple-to-use tool boasting a low setup time (sign-up and installation) of only five minutes.
4. Montastic
Montastic is a free, quick, and easy-to-use tool for keeping constant knowledge of your websites’ availability. Developed by Metadot, Montastic sends you warnings whenever your site crashes (and when it comes back up) through email, RSS, or their Windows and Mac widget. Montastic lets you monitor up to 100 sites per account, supports monitoring for HTTP and HTTP Secure connections, and a simple and elegant end-user interface.
5. ServerMojo
ServerMojo is a simple-to-use service for supervising your web server’s uptime. It alerts you via IM, Twitter, and email when your site is unavailable. ServerMojo permits you to monitor one site at one-hour intervals.
6. HostTracker
HostTracker is a free web tool for monitoring site availability. You can monitor up to two websites at a time and get free weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports on your web server’s performance. HostTracker provides distributed monitoring, tracking of useful data on site availability for diagnostics, and alerts of issues via email, IM, and/or SMS. HostTracker’s front page features a nice utility widget for instantly checking your website’s availability: you simply enter your URL and it will ping your server.
7. Observu
Observu is a very simple tool intentionally designed for rapid set-up and ease of use. With Observu, you can monitor an unlimited amount of websites/web servers, which is great for multi-site owners who want a hassle-free way of keeping track of what’s going on with their web properties.
8. InternetSeer
InternetSeer has a free standard service that offers 60-minute intervals for monitoring your site’s uptime and performance. It gives you site availability and page response time reports, real-time error notifications, and a weekly report on your server’s performance for diagnostics.
9. FreeSiteStatus
FreeSiteStatus is a web-based application that provides email alerts of your site’s downtime, a monitoring interval of 60 minutes, and a distributed monitoring network of 13 global locations. FreeSiteStatus also has a nifty tool on the site called "Quick Test" for instantly checking your site services’ performance and availability (i.e. HTTP, POP3, MySQL, FTP, and more).
10. SiteUptime
SiteUptime is a free tool that lets you monitor one site at 30 or 60-minute intervals from four geographical locations. You can monitor your HTTP (web server), POP3 (email server), FTP server, and more using SiteUptime. It also gives you the option to display your availability statistics publicly, which you can use as a site widget to show off your site or web application’s high-availability. Check out the live demo of SiteUptime.
11. Basic State
Basic State is a free monitoring tool for uptime, server, and network failures of your site. Basic State checks your website at 15-minute intervals and sends you notifications via email or text message when something goes kaboom. With a simple sign-up process that will get you set up in no time and the ability to keep tabs on any number of sites, Basic State is a solid option to consider when looking into site monitoring tools.
12. Livewatch
Livewatch allows you to get alerts when your site is unavailable via email, SMS, phone, IM, and even Twitter. It can record and create PDF reports for site failures so that you can keep track of downtime events for documentation and troubleshooting. They also have a nice and simple web tool for instantly checking your site availability called Free HTTP Check that quickly checks your web server’s availability.
What tool do you use to for monitoring uptime/availability?
Do you have a tool not on the list that you use for your sites and applications? Do you have positive or negative experiences that you’d like to share about the tools featured here? Please do share your thoughts and opinions with us in the comments.
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38 Comments
daftviking
June 12th, 2009
Great timing on this article – I’m currently looking into server monitoring after having not one, but two VPSs on different providers fail within 5 days (Sunday in the great VAserv hack/massacre, and then Friday with a RAID failure on a single server at Linode). I’m currently using “Are My Sites Up”, and have been generally happy with it so far, but it’ll be helpful to see what the rest of the playing field looks like.
Maxime Perron Caissy
June 12th, 2009
This is a very interesting article, it happened too many times that I had to learn from others that one of my sites was down.
MPC
Danh ba web 2.0
June 13th, 2009
Cool tools, thanks for great collection.
More: Chartbeat.com and Notifymee.com
Advertising Copywriting
June 13th, 2009
i use host-tracker but you have some more good sites here,
its really important to notice the uptime and downtime,
if every month its down for more then a day you should contact your host
Abdul
June 13th, 2009
Nice collection. Every monitor sites analyse the website performing in server point of view. But What i exactly need is , to make solution for that problem is better for users
Patternhead
June 13th, 2009
Great list, didn’t realise there were so many free options :D
Scott Mallinson
June 13th, 2009
I have used Pingdom’s services before, both the Paid-for version for professional application and GIGRIB for my personal websites. They are very accurate and provide a good range of tools for testing and alerting you to website failures.
Mikayel
June 13th, 2009
I will suggest also checking premium version of mon.itor.us http://www.monitis.com for those who has mission critical applications
Ken Bavier
June 13th, 2009
One of my fellow Joyeurs created this wonderful free service to monitor your sites uptime and responsiveness. You might find it a good addition to your existing list. Check it out at http://monpage.com/
Jane
June 13th, 2009
Excellent collection!
Thanks
Ahmad Alfy
June 13th, 2009
I’ve used moni.tor.us for a while and it’s really useful.
I am going to try (Are My Sites Up) it looks cool!
Jash Sayani
June 13th, 2009
Have been using AreMySitesUp from a long time… However, they should allow Free users to use the iPhone app!
Checking out SiteUptime
TheNorba
June 13th, 2009
excellent! Very useful services ;-)
Wojtek Siudzinski
June 13th, 2009
Great list. I personally use Pingdom with iPhone App (unfortunately this requires you to pay). But this is only checking if web server is up and running. Lately I wrote tool for checking server performance, called stopeo ( http://stopeo.com ). Maybe it’ll be useful for someone :)
Lorne Pike
June 13th, 2009
Great resources. A lot of us are surprised to find how often sites can go down, even if just for a few seconds at a time. One lost contact could be expensive for a business depending on its Website to bring in money. It make sense to know your site’s uptime.
seengee
June 13th, 2009
+1 for pingdom, great service with free iphone app too.
cant believe noone else has mentioned my personal favourite tho.. has your site gone titsup ;) http://titsup.net/
Michael
June 13th, 2009
If you’re interested in trying one more, PagerDuty is simple and free.
Check it out at http://pagerduty.missingfeature.com
spenser
June 13th, 2009
Hi,
Just dropped by to thank you for the mention.
You did a great job on the artwork.
Spenser
Gary Barber
June 13th, 2009
Perfect timing. Great article, I was just looking for a bunch of server monitors.
Anthony
June 14th, 2009
im currently using AreMySitesUp which seems to work well for me…plus if im watching Twitter a mention usually pops up there too
Sam G. Daniel
June 14th, 2009
Great list. I currently have an internal application monitoring our sites but an external one would go hand in hand. I like Site 24×7 because of it’s e-commerce tracking system. It records a sample transactions and uses that to test. This is what really made the difference with the others for me.
Ann
June 15th, 2009
Great overview, but can you please add our _new_ AlertFox service to the list?
AFAIK we are the only service that offers free *transaction* monitoring. You can record your test transactions with the iMacros Firefox extension and then upload it to our service.
Ann
taylan
June 15th, 2009
Great list. I am using InternetSeer for two years, very good service.
Farid Hadi
June 16th, 2009
I’ve been using Are My Sites Up? since they announced the application and it’s pretty decent. They did have a few glitches in the beginning, just like any other new app out there but they fixed them real fast.
I haven’t tried any of the others but I can recommend Are My Sites Up?
Gene
June 16th, 2009
Copied almost verbatim from http://www.dzinepress.com/2009/06/10-exceptional-free-tools-for-monitoring-your-websites-uptime/, or that link copied this one.
Jacob Gube
June 16th, 2009
@Gene: Seeing as the post date on that link is June 15, 2009 and my story was published on June 12, 2009 – they copied this. Although if I could travel to the future, that would rock! :)
Here’s a screenshot in case they decide to change their posting date: http://i42.tinypic.com/33a6yd4.jpg
lance_
June 17th, 2009
Another cool service for VPS owners: Server Density.
In addition to notifying you when there’s downtime, it can also notify you when too much RAM is being used, or the load is too high, or the swap file is starting to be used.
The free plan is good for one server with two alerts which is enough for most VPS users.
lars vraa
June 20th, 2009
Hi Jacob, Good article I think the subject is really interesting. I find it really sad that some one more or less copied your article and I can only recommend that you put watermarks on some or all images in your articles as it is likely to keep the most lazy of them frem taking your articles. I use watermarks on my site. Good comments also thanks anyone!
Jacob Gube
June 20th, 2009
@lars vraa: Thank you for your concern, it is that type of care for Six Revisions that make it such a pleasure to keep going. With regards to watermarks, I find that it is intrusive; I know that I can use CSS to hide these watermarks but I also believe that it won’t stop content thieves from taking resources from Six Revisions. I’d much rather spend the time I would take worrying, reporting, and dealing with content theft to creating fresh and new content for you guys. If the content taken from Six Revisions gets read by someone and they find a use for it and it has enhanced their knowledge, then I’m all for it; whether they learn it from the original source or from someone who’s stolen it… to me, what’s more important is that someone’s benefited from the information.
lars vraa
June 20th, 2009
@Jacob: I think you have the right approach and focus.
@all: One tool that I have been using (trail) to invetigate problems is Uptrends.com. This tool rocks but it is also quite expensive. They have a free plan too but it is not worth looking further at.
pingability.com is another service i found that is worth investigating. As far as I can see it is free if you link back. I tried it briefly and it is very flexible in the way you build up alerts triggers and actions.
Carina
June 25th, 2009
Thank you so much for this excellent collection!
Aryz
July 10th, 2009
Thanks for this site, I’d look on your recommended sites and see which one would best cater for my. I really need one to in order to stop being worried if my site works.
ruthdabu
July 10th, 2009
This is s good news to those who wants to keep track of their personal or business domain; you will be able to keep track of what’s happening to your site now with this new tool, thanks for the good news!
rajesh
July 15th, 2009
I use 100pulse.com and it is good too
VSouza
August 5th, 2009
Someone know some program to still beeping from local speaker when my internet connection down? Contact me at morespafrom-temp02@yahoo.com.br
J.Pons
September 29th, 2009
Checking the the website too often can overload your servers.
But in some cases, you need a faster reaction in case of failure!
This services monitors EVERY SECOND your services, and.. without overloading it!
TurboMonitor
Janala
October 23rd, 2009
Thank you. Its a very nice post to get every site list for checking uptime. But smtimes its too bad if there are lot of queries in server and hosting company going to banned the site.
vinoth
February 3rd, 2010
@Rajesh
Me too using 100pulse.com Its nice
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