How to control if hosting is up 24x7x365?

2nd time I see mine down...

[silverbytes]

I caught my site down for 2nd time this week. Never noticed before but an email from other hosting company came to my inbox telling me they were monitoring my hosting service and found it down many times..

I see it's true!
So how can I control when they are online and when offline? My site is there!

Is there an online checker or something?

Thanks!

[keyplyr]

Yes there are several free and many other subscription services to monitor your website's uptime. Search Google for "website monitoring" "site uptime" and similiar search terms.

However, be advised that some of these services, while helpful, do not accurtately reflect virtuosity. They will ping on the hour or half hour (more for paid subscriptions) and many times web congestion will interfere with the accuracy; meaning your server will be doing it's job, but some geographical groups may not be accessing your site due to net block interference, high traffic, etc.

[amznVibe]

After a long time searching and trying various programs, the best I have found to really check up hosts is Alchemy Eye. Rather pricey, but has some amazing configuration ability (like checking for a certain phrase on your pages, dozens of types of services, etc). It can even be told that even after one failed test, not to freak and alert you, but to wait until X number of times fail, and to decrease the testing delay after the first failure. Very well thought out, and it does full but easy to read reports.

(if anyone knows of a lower priced alternative that's even almost as good let me know so I can recommend it!)

By the way,remember that even if your host promises 99.9% uptime, that's almost 9 hours a year downtime!
99.5% uptime is almost 44 hours of downtime per year!

Oh and those downtime spams from other hosts? They are just that - spams
- so don't believe them unless you signed up for monitoring from them.

[silverbytes]

Thank you both. I've found some free services.
They claim to check every 5 minutes your site all the time.
I wonder if that couldn't be harmfull for my site...
Looks like autospam!

What do you say?

[aus_dave]

I have found free services do not accurately report site uptime (e.g. false alarms etc.).

If you are just looking for simple web server monitoring Alertra [alertra.com] may be of interest to you.