PaulPA - 12:18 pm on Oct 20, 2009 (gmt 0)

I run a Joomla site with a good amount of traffic for its niche but I do not run it as a full time operation so there are times during the day when I do not look at the site for several hours. Yesterday was a bad day not to look at the site as it essentially went down from 10 am until I noticed it not functioning correctly around 5 pm.

Because it does generate revenue, I am thinking about using an uptime monitoring service of some kind. However, while I see this as being useful to alert me if the site is not accessible at all, what happened yesterday is a little different. For some reason the Joomla session table crashed and when you went to the site a message displayed indicating there was this problem.

My questions is would a monitoring service really view this as the site being down since, in effect, a page did load, granted with an error message? If monitoring services are capable of doing this, would most all monitoring services do this or should I just look for certain types?