Free Services to Monitor Your Site’s Uptime

 You can’t sit staring at your monitor 24 hours a day to keep an eye on your website(s), so thank the heavens for the free services out there that do it for you.
Whether site downtime means loss of revenue or just loss of face, or you need to stay a step ahead of your clients, these services offer you a completely free way of knowing what’s up, what’s down and in some cases, why.
Read on for our list of ten suggested solutions, but as this list is by no means exhaustive, please do share any services you favor in the comments.

1.UptimeRobot

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 50
Regularity of Checks: Every 5 minutes
Methods of Alerts: E-mail, SMS, RSS
UptimeRobot looks at your site header’s status codes every five minutes and if the code comes back with a problem, does further checks. Then, if there are still issues, it lets you know about it pronto. Created by two devs who think the web should be free or cheap, it’s guaranteed a no-payment service until August 2010, so hop over now to check it out.

2. Pingdom

 

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1
Regularity of Checks: User set, from 1 minute upwards
Methods of Alerts: E-mail, SMS (up to 20 per month), push alerts via iPhone app
Pingdom is a big boy of the paid monitoring services market, but does offer a very basic free account. Although the free service only lets you monitor one site, we feel it’s particularly worthy of mention since it comes with a free iPhone app gives you a handy on-the-go solution for monitoring your website’s status.

3. Mon.itor.us

 

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1
Regularity of Checks: Every 30 minutes
Methods of Alerts: IM, SMS, E-mail, RSS
Mon.itor.us is the free little sister service to Monitis and offers a simple set-up for its external monitoring. As well as alerts, the app tracks failures and logs a report of the uptime/downtime of your website per day, week or month and makes the reports available to you in real time.

4. Are My Sites Up?

 

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 5
Regularity of Checks: 25 times a day
Methods of Alerts:
The freebie option from Are My Sites Up? checks as many as five of your sites at least 25 times per day with unlimited email and SMS notifications that, in most cases, will help tell you why your site has gone offline by providing the HTML status error code. Paying up for the premium service opens up access to an iPhone app that is sadly not available for free accounts.