Late last year, I had some issues with hosting performance, and my blog wasn’t always stable. If it was hit with excess traffic or if a plugin wasn’t working optimally, my blog went down for generally short periods of time. Â The most frustrating thing about it was that it usually required a quick reset and it would go back to normal.
If I was out of the office or if it was in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t know that my blog was down until someone emailed me or until I returned and tried to log in to approve comments or write an article. I sought out a way to detect if my blog goes down, and I want to share that information with you, especially if you have mini sites that you don’t check regularly.
I use Montastic.com to monitor some of my websites, and it’s a great (free) tool. I signed up and gave them the domain names of a few important websites. When one of them goes down for some reason, I get an email alerting me to the outage. I then get a follow up when the site is functional again.
I never realized how frequently a couple of my sites went down, and after seeing this information, it got me to switch to a more flexible cloud server, where I’ve had much fewer problems.
Montastic also has upgraded plans that allow you to access other tools as well as have your website monitored more frequently. I think it’s a great tool to have monitoring your critical sites.
Hi Elliot:
Just curious why you had the initial serving problems. Was it your own server or a service?
Mark
@ Mark
I think most of it was outdated plugins that used up quite a bit of bandwidth, especially when there was a lot of traffic hitting the site. That kind of put the shared server in overdrive and killed it a few times due to memory issues.
Great tool Elliot! I also suggest uptimerobot.com, I use this one and I think it’s very cool 😉 p.s: you can monitor up to 50 websites
it’s a great tool, I use it too. But sometimes you need multiple services to monitor sites just in case one is down. I created PingNotify.com a similar free service. It’s still not fully ready yet, but is functional.
Hi Elliot,
Thanks for sharing this tool. I can also recommend wasitup.com if one wants something basic but really simple – you even don’t need to sign up to start monitoring; and pingdom.com – it’s much more advanced but allows only single site free monitoring.
I also recently started using mxtoolbox.com – it is expected to monitor the MX record settings of your domain. I think this can be helpful in being more sure that your domain forwards emails to email server and you won’t loose some of them – this can be critical for business.
nice post..i also suggest http://www.monitorscout.com which ensures high quality monitoring services with over 15 monitoring locations across the globe to control uptime and latency for your website and/or server solution.
Nice presentation, Elliot! Nevertheless, I also agree with other commenters here that it is also advisable to use several monitoring tools. They are free so we can take advantage of them, right? :P. Anyways, I also want to share PushMon, the free monitoring tool I used for my scheduled batch scripts. The script is set to run on a certain time of the day. PushMon notifies me whenever my program wasn’t able to call the PushMon URL. It simply tells me that something might be wrong or has stop it from running.
There are now several free web monitoring tool and services that help you monitor your website uptime and performance and I start using http://www.monitive.com.
Another free monitoring service is MonitorHub https://www.monitorhub.com/free-website-monitoring really easy to set up as it’s a little less technical.