I need a good RELIABLE site monitor

anyone using a good one they like?

[theweblady]

I need to keep track of downtime on 2 specific sites, and i am unsure which ones are worthwhile, especially if i have to pay for it-

sticky me if u can help with info-

thanks!

[aus_dave]

I use these two:

Free: [siteuptime.com ]

Paid: [alertra.com ]

They both seem to be quite good although if you only have a minute or two of downtime and they check your site at that particular time it can be a bit misleading.

[sublime1]

Keynote (www.keynote.com) is apparently releasing a low-end version of their really excellent tools. Standard is $395/month, this new low-end version is as little as $50/month -- one page request from something like 10 locations over an hour. You can get a 15-day demo of their system -- I really like it.

[sublime1]

So I am looking at [siteuptime.com...] which is totally free and have a question: how do they make money -- why are they being altruistic? Their privacy policy indicates they don't sell any of the registration information. Anyone have any ideas?

Just following up on the notion that "if it looks to good to be true, it probably is" ;-)

[rogerd]

I've used a free service from internetseer.com. They seem to make money by spamming you with various offers, and including ads in all your status reports.

[sublime1]

Ah -- banner ads. Now I feel better :-)

Thanks

[sublime1]

OK, after a day with siteuptime, I think I know why they are free.

First, the don't download a page, they just ping a specific port (e.g. http/80). This will tell you that there's a network problem, or that your web server has bitten the big one, but not much more granularity than that.

Second, I found out they don't check pages after checking back to the site and seeing that my service had been "failing" all day long because I had put in a full URL, not just the domain name. I never got paged.

I guess you get what you pay for.

And on that score, update on Keynote: their "$50/month" service comes with a $19.95 "account set up fee" (according to the quote) or "base device fee" (according to the sales person), for a total of $70/month. I wish he had just told me it was $70/month to start!

:-)

[aus_dave]

Alertra has a good reputation and you can spend as much money as you like on it (costs more for more frequent checking, more ports etc.).

Site Uptime is not that reliable but I guess if it's free you can't complain too much :).

[sublime1]

I have been using Alertra now for about a week or so, and it seems to do exactly what I need. We simulated an outage and it detected it and escalated as we wanted. Pricing is very reasonable, about 1/2 what Keynote wanted for about the same service.