Which Uptime Monitoring Software?

[SilverSpirit]

I was wondering what everyone uses to monitor their sites' uptime?

I need a service that uses HTTP Content - checks for the presence of a string on my 50+ websites.

For long years, I have used small freeware utilities SiteUp and WebMon. SiteUp is very reliable, but I haven't found a way to copy the settings from PC to PC. So, at each reinstall or PC change, I have to reprogram all my 50+ sites manually. WebMon appears unreliable on Win7.

Almost all online services are at a ridiculous price. Nodeping.com does offer a reasonable service for $10 a month and up to 1000 urls... but somehow I prefer to have that on my machines... just in case the service goes bust or increases the prices...

Any other software you have experience with?

[enigma1]

I don't know how sophisticated you want this to be. I would had gone with a local server do fsockopen, set a cron perhaps and check the sites at any interval I want, then store the responses in a database in case I need to generate graphs etc.

You only need to make one request per time interval to each site I would think. Since you have 50 sites not thousands, a single system should be adequate.

[xaban]

Try this one out: [website-monitoring.com ]

[SilverSpirit]

enigma1, thanks, if I understand well, fsockopen installs on one of my website hosting accounts, checks other accounts from there and alerts me by email if one of them is down over a certain period of time. That would be OK. Does it have the ability to search for a particular string on my sites? - That solution looks good; I could even install it on 2-3 different servers in different locations; but I would need to hire a coder to set it up, since I don't have much experience with PHP myself - but that's not such a big deal.

xaban, website-monitoring.com is one of those services at unrealistic prices. To monitor my 50 sites would cost $1,000 / year. That's more than what I spend on hosting these sites.

[enigma1]

I use PHP mainly and fsockopen is a general php function to open a connection.
[php.net...]
From there you can read any page of a domain basically. Pretty much like a browser does but automated because the local system can run a server and setup cron jobs to execute the script periodically. The data gathered from the connection can be stored in a database. So a typical combination with Apache, PHP, MySQL can do that and it's a very common environment on a host, in case you want to do this from multiple servers.