5 tools to monitor website uptime

If you have a blog or corporate website and you don’t have managed hosting, like me, then it might be worth a few dollars a year to invest in a website uptime monitoring service. These services basically ping your website at specific intervals and send out alerts if your site goes down.

I’ve been using it on several of my blogs and it’s definitely come in handy on several occasions. Depending on the service, you also get to see how long the site was down and your uptime percentage.

Previously, I wrote on Online Tech Tips about two services you could use to monitor website uptime or downtime, but both services are free and don’t have the best features, etc that you could get with a paid service.

Firstly, the free services usually will only check your site on an hourly basis, which is ok for a very low traffic site, but not sufficient for small businesses or higher traffic blogs. An hour of downtime can really hurt a blog, an ecommerce site, etc.

Here are five of the most popular online services for monitoring the uptime for a website:

1. SiteUptime

SiteUptime is my favorite for monitoring your website 24/7. They have several plans, including a free one, to help ensure timely alerts of website downtime. The free plan will check one site every 30 or 60 minutes, plus you get all the graphical reports and stats.

For $5 a month, you can monitor 3 websites and reduce the monitoring time to 5 or 15 minute checks. If you pay a little extra, you can even reduce it to 2 minute checks. You can also choose the service you want to monitor (HTTP, SMTP, FTP, POP3, etc) and choose the location from which you want the check to originate from.

For $10 a month, you can monitor 6 sites and get SMS alerts. You can also monitor custom TCP ports if you like.

2. Host-Tracker

Host-Tracker is another really good website monitoring service. It also has a free plan that lets you monitor up to 2 websites at 30 minute intervals, similar to SiteUptime.

If you get the Light plan at $5 a month, you can monitor up to 5 websites at 10 minute interval checking. That’s not as good as the 5 minute checking with SiteUptime, but the $5 plan at Host-Tracker includes SMS alerts, which is a nice feature if you can’t always check your email from your phone.

It will check your website using HEAD, GET methods. To check using POST, you have to upgrade to the PRO plan for $30 a month, which is a bit expensive in my view. Only their Light plan is worth the money unless you have up to 20 websites and want to check them every minute, which the PRO plans does.

3. BasicState

BasicState is a free website uptime monitoring service that will check your website every 15 minutes. This is actually pretty good for being completely free. Also, it will instantly send you an email or an SMS alert when your website goes down.

The other great features of this service is that there are no limits to the number of websites that you can monitor. Overall, it’s a great service to quickly find out if your site goes down due to a server outage, network outage, server overload, DNS configuration issue, or SSL certificate problem.

You also receive an email every day with a summary of all of the sites performance. The only issue I can see with a service like this is that they probably don’t have as many servers and locations monitoring your website like SiteUptime and Host-Tracker do. The worst thing that can happen is that the service you are using to monitor your website goes down!

It would be best to try to search for reviews of BasicState online before you sign up. Or since it’s free, you can always you multiple website monitoring services to check your site.

4. Pingdom

Pingdom is another popular website monitoring service that has two plans. The Basic plan will allow you to monitor 5 websites and includes SMS and email notifications. It also has multiple check locations and will check HTTP, TCP, Ping and UDP protocols.

The cool thing about Pingdom is that you can check every minute with the Basic plan, which costs $10 a month. It’s a double the cost of the SiteUptime basic plan, but it includes SMS alerts and have 1 minute interval checking.

The Business plan is $40 a month, but doesn’t offer anything that great for the price. It basically ups the number of SMS alerts and the number of sites you can check. However, it’s definitely not worth that much.

5. justUptime

justUptime might actually be the best out of all of the website monitoring services! They have two plans, Basic and Business. The Basic plan will let you monitor 5 websites and includes 20 SMS alerts and 100 email alerts per month. Personally, unless you are on horrible hosting, you probably should not be getting that many alerts in a month.

The best thing is that the price of the Basic plan is $4 a month, a dollar cheaper than the other guys. Plus it includes all the popular checks, such as HTTP, Ping, TCP/UDP, DNS, POP3, SMTP, FTP, and more.

Also, for the $4 a month, you get 1 minute interval checking, which is the best out of all of the other sites for the price. Plus it includes checks from locations around the world, so you don’t have to worry about the monitoring server going down.

Hopefully, the quick review of these 5 sites will help you decide on a service for monitoring the uptime of your website. Use something different that’s better? Post a comment here. Enjoy!