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Have you ever seen a web host that don’t claims 99.99% up time guarantee? With so much experience with several leading web hosts of industry, what I have realized is that most of them have sub standard services.
Today I am going to tell you my bad experience with one of the leading web hosts of Industry, Dreamhost. After starting with them, I was very happy with their shared servers but things went bad when I moved to Dreamhost PS. My personal tech blog was having so much down times that uptime went to 94% in just 2 weeks and to even surprise you more, it happened after moving to Dreamhost Personal Servers (which are designed to handle big traffic, at least is their words). After so many ticket queries and live chat, there was no solution hence I decided to move to a new web host as Crispy Tech needed a personal server for its traffic.
If you want to keep an eye on your web host, Its very necessary that you use a website monitoring service which notifies you when your website goes down.
Today we have come up with best free website monitoring services which help you to monitor your website. It was easy for me to write an article with 20 website monitoring services but I have only included the best ones which we have actually used before. So let’s start.
1. Uptime Robot
A Quick Look
- Price: Free
- Number of Sites You can monitor: 50
- Notification Methods: RSS, Twitter, Email, SMS
- Time Interval for each check: 5 Minutes
- Simple yet effective
Uptime robot is one of the finest and completely free website monitoring services. Co Founded by Umut Muhaddisoglu of WebResourcesDepot, Uptime Robot is our personal choice for monitoring on 1stWD.
The monitoring service has no Premium Plans and their free services are more than enough for any web developer. You can monitor 50 websites for free with options of getting notified with:
- Twitter DM
- RSS
- SMS.
Pretty awesome. Right?
Uptime Robot checks your website with regular interval of 5 minutes.
In a talk with Umut, he assured us that Uptime Robot will be free till September 2010 and then they will introduce premium plans (In case if they are unable to continue Free Plan) but free plan will still be there with some modifications. Although the web app is not feature enriched but Its awesome for those who just want the work done with out whistles and bells.
One thing you will fall in love with is the completely Ajaxed interface of Uptime Robot. After signing up, just play with different areas of website and you will enjoy the experience.:)
Missing Features:
We would love to see better support for SMS notifications in UpTime Robot. While writing this review, SMS notifications are not supported World Wide. Another awesome feature would be iPhone/ Android App.
2. Pingdom
A Quick Look
- Price: From Free to 39$/month
- Number of Sites You can monitor: 1 for free
- Notification Methods: RSS, Twitter, Email, SMS
- Time Interval for each check: From 1 Minute to changeable
Pingdom is by far the most comprehensive and enterprise solution for website monitoring services. With all those nifty and expensive plans they also provide the option of a free website monitoring plan which allows you to monitor one website for free.
Pingdom is the biggest guy in thr world of website monitoring services with customers ranging from of Alexa to Mashable.
Pingdom is feature enriched and has its own free iPhone app. With support of Response time tracking, you can also check how your server reponds when it experiences traffic load.
3. Zabbix
Quick Look:
- Self Hosted Solution
- Open Source
- Free
If you are a big fan of Open Source softwares then Zabbix is for you. Its completely free and licensed under GPL v2 which means you are free to do modifications in the core software and pass it on. There are no proprietary restrictions on you.
Zabbix is such a comprehensive tool that a book has been written on it which covers all of its features. There is no pre-hosted version and you will have to install it yourself after downloading it. The tool is pretty complex and I only suggest it for Advanced users.
4. Basic State
A Quick Look
- Price: Free
- Number of Sites You can monitor: Unlimited
- Notification Methods: Email, SMS
- Time Interval for each check: From 1 Minute to changeable
With support of email and SMS notifications, Zabbix is another completely free web monitoring service. You can have unlimited monitors active with Basic state. The web app checks your website’s header with regular intervals of 15 Minutes. Though the home page of basicstate don’t gives a professional look but I have personally tested and was using it before I came to know Uptime Robot.
5. 100 Pulse
A Quick Look
- Price: Free/ Premium Plans
- Number of Sites You can monitor: 2 Websites for Free
- Notification Methods: Email, SMS, Twitter, iGoogle Gadget
- Time Interval for each check: 15 Minutes
100Pulse is another free website monitoring service which comes with an inituitive user interface. The free plan allows you to monitor the status of two web properties and you will be notified using Twitter, Email and SMS. They also have an option of Google Widget which you can set up on your desktop or iGoogle.
I hope that you liked the article. Which web service do you use for website monitoring? Feel free to share it with us.
If you need your own portfolio to use these on, check out ProFolio
Great article!
Thanks for the article. As your suggestion, I’ve used uptime robot and it works fine.
I am using http://100pulse.com/. This monitoring service is very efficient and provides me with periodical reports and instant alerts.
[...] Ehkä tieto on oikea, mutta sitten on varmaa, kun sinulla on oma seuranta. Tässä pitkä lista ohjelmista, jotka hoitavat homman. Itse otin käyttöön palvelun nimeltä Uptime Robot, jonne saa ilmaiseksi [...]
Nice list you have! I’m also a fan of aremysitesup.com
Already explained that why I didn’t included in the list.
Thanks for the list!
Great list but i like the uptime robot..
Thanks
.-= Hastimal Shah´s last blog ..How to Build your own search Engine =-.
Yeah. Same here.:)
Thanks for compiling this list for us. I signed up at uptimerobot and am pretty impressed so far. Free? Check. Monitor up to 50 sites? Check. Awesome =) (although I’m only monitoring 3 sites so far…)
Haha. Same here. That’s what I asked Umut, that how you will create a premium plan. Your free plan is more than enough.:D
The other day Google dropped my website 5 positions because when Google tried to cache it, the website was down :(
With a service like uptime robot I can have the ability to monitor my main website and be aware if it’s down.
thanks for the tips!
Great round up. I have been using Uptime Robot for a while now. It works great and it catches things and I have even used its report emails to send to my host support when they didn’t believe me that site was going down at all.
As for the other services. Should I be using more than one service to monitor my sites and client sites?
.-= element321´s last blog ..14 Useful Articles for Bloggers, WordPress Users, and Social Media Users =-.
Well, if you have a very high traffic website, then I will suggest you to also use pingdom. Their response time reports are very awesome.
Thanks for the list. I’m currently using pingdom and hyperspin. Some of these are new to me so I will definitely check them out.
Great post.
I have to say that i’ve had loads of problems with hosts in the past and wish i’d have had this kind of info a couple of years ago.
.-= Adie´s last blog ..CSS Image Menu Tutorial =-.
Great round-up and very useful. I’ll try Uptime Robot for start…
.-= Gadget Guy´s last blog ..Jailbreak iOS 4.0 GM on iPhone 3G & iPod Touch 2G with Redsn0w 0.9.5 B5 =-.
Great info Saad, I think Google analytic should include this features in their system.
.-= Nikunj Tamboli´s last blog ..New Apple Iphone 4 Is The God Of Phone Here With iOS 4.0 =-.
Bare in mind that:
99% uptime equates to nearly 7.5 hours downtime per month
99.9% uptime equates to 45 minutes downtime per month
99.995% is the real gold standard and what businesses should be looking for, this equates to 2 minutes a month
These are normally calculated as averages over the year, so an hour’s downtime at some point during the year shouldn’t be regarded as a major issue.
Great calculations – never actually counted numbers like this, but you’re right. In blogs it’s hard to get such high number because of social networks, traffic spikes – we keep getting downtimes despite to expensive hosting we’re getting.
Do you think 7.5 hours down time in a month is nothing? I don’t agree with you. When you are paying them then you have the right to ask them to provide 100% Uptime.
Uptime robot is pretty awesome!
1stWD team,
Thanks very much for featuring Uptime Robot, so appreciated and great to hear that you use and like the service.
Thanks for creating an awesome app which we all love to use.:)
I use Are My Sites Up? http://aremysitesup.com/
It’s simple to configure and there’s also an Air app for monitoring from the desktop.
Well, Its free plan is useless. The check a website 25 times a day which means at one hour interval almost. What if the website goes down just after the check and you will come to know after an hour. Don’t use the webapps because of the names attached to them. Use them because of the quality they are providing.