Monitoring your website constantly to avoid downtime is something
that is very critical to the success of any website. This is
particularly important if the website is making some good revenue
already. It is very important because once a website is down several
things can happen. First of all visitors trying to access the site will
get disappointed and leave, revenue is automatically lost because there
are no visitors, visitors who could have become loyal followers of the
website may be lost etc. the damage is that can be done is much. The
good news is that there are several websites now that offer downtime
monitoring services for other websites. There are free as well as
premium based services. Some of them are explained below.
Mon.itor.us
This is a very robust online downtime monitoring service. It boasts of
rendering its services to about one hundred and twenty thousand websites
currently. The service features include internal monitoring and visitor
tracking. The frequency of website visits is usually about five minutes
and some of the supported protocols include HTTP/HTTPS, POP3, IMAP,
FTP, TCP/IP etc. whenever there is any downtime, the webmaster is
usually instantly alerted either through an email, SMS message, or pager
alert.
Internetseer.com
This service prides itself as one of the biggest website monitor
services available with over two million monitored websites and over
seventy thousand alerts sent to webmasters. Some of the features of the
website that are usually monitored include availability monitoring,
performance monitoring, link and image checking, transaction monitoring,
historical and detailed check reporting. Reports of alerts sent are
also provided. Webmasters are normally notified through an email, SMS
messages on cell phone or pager alerts. It has a free service and a
premium service but the free service is highly limited with a lot of
features unavailable.
Dotcom Monitors
This is another web monitoring service that offers website monitoring,
web application and business transaction monitoring, network device
monitoring, analysis and graphs, alerts, notifications and escalations.
It also monitors web load stress test and multi user support. The
monitoring frequency is about sixty minutes and supported protocols
include HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, DNS, FTP, SOAP, Video, and Audio. It is
basically a premium service and alerts are usually sent to webmasters
in the form of emails, and text messages to cell phones. This makes it
easy for a webmaster to know the current state of all the applications
on their website.
