If you want to monitor a site is up or down, you don’t want to check the site in every minute or every hour. There are some dedicated tools available for it, or if you can do things by reading the instruction you can do a workaround in some popular applications like Google Docs, to monitor website’s uptime. Here we mentioned the two approaches, first we are talking about some dedicated tools and second we are revealing the simple workaround to monitor the website’s uptime form your browser or some ways to notify you about the site downtime, when it is not accessible through email or through SMS.
Pingdom
Pingdom tools offers an advanced interface to monitor website or server, but the service is paid one. But you can monitor one website or server using the free package.
Uptime Robot
This is our favorite tool at this time. Uptime Robot is all about helping you to keep your websites up. You can up to 50 websites to monitor for free. You’ll get alerts by e-mail, SMS, Twitter, RSS or push notifications for iPhone/iPad.The service monitors your websites every 5 minutes and alerts you if your sites are down. The uptime robot asks for the websites headers and gets status codes like “200-ok”, “404-not found”, etc. every 5 minutes, if the status code doesn’t indicate a problem, then good. If the status code is~400+ and 500+, then the site is not loading, in order to make sure the site is down, Uptime Robot makes several more checks in the next 3 minutes, if the site is still down, it sends an alert.
ServiceUptime
This is also a website uptime monitoring service, whenever your website becomes inaccessible or returns incorrect data the ServiceUptime alerts you within seconds of the event via email or SMS.
Site24x7
Site24x7 continuously checks the availability of your websites at regular time intervals. If your site is found to be down or unavailable, it immediately notifies you via Email, SMS, RSS or Twitter so that you can take corrective actions quickly before it affects end users. You can get instant alerts via SMS, Voice, Email, Twitter, RSS feeds or Push Notifications(for Android handsets).
Siteuptime
SiteUptime is a website monitoring service that checks your website or server at regular intervals and notifies you via email or SMS if a problem is detected. Free and Paid plans are available. With the free plan one can monitor 1 site in a 30/60 minute check. In the premium and advanced plan you can download the statistics record.
Monitor.us
It is a free Website uptime monitoring and response time monitoring tool. It can track website availability and performance from different locations in major countries and traffic destinations.
Uptime Dog
Uptime Dog is a free website uptime monitoring service.The free website monitoring service will check availability of your website every 2 minutes to see if it is online and working, and notifies you to your email address if it is down. Your website will be checked every 2 minutes from two different geographical locations and once unresponsive to both our monitoring servers, you’ll receive an email notification instantly.
Uptimespy
UptimeSpy.com claims that it has nodes around the world to ensure your website issues are pinpointed. They are doing this because one node reports your site is down, does not mean it is offline. It is important to make sure your website is responding quickly to maintain positive Google rankings.
You can also use some other tolls like binarycanary, internetseer, basicstate, montastic, etc.
Bonus Tip
You don’t want to login these services to check your site’s uptime statistics. Just obtain the RSS feed link from the monitoring service and add it in your favorite RSS reader. The app shows a new post related to the site uptime or downtime as a new RSS news feed. We are using the uptimerobot, it is an excellent free tool. First we added the sites in uptime robot and then obtained the RSS link ( it is like http://rss.uptimerobot.com/yoursitemonitorfeed). Google’s Chrome is our favorite browser, so we installed an extension Slick RSS feed reader in it to read RSS feeds, and then added the uptime robot RSS feed link. So whenever a new alert appears in the RSS ,it will be noticed in the Slick RSS button in the Chrome browser. We can check easily the alert messages by simply clicking the RSS button. Cool ! isn’t it?
There is also a workaround to activate the email and sms alert in Google Docs. Check the labnol’s tips to monitor website’s uptime with Google Docs. Which method you are using for monitoring your website or blog?
