Site uptime monitoring

[black coffee]

Hey,

I wonder if anybody uses any website monitoring services?

I've searched with google and found dozens them....

Which one is better?

Does anybody use <snip>

[edited by: trillianjedi at 12:19 pm (utc) on May 19, 2005]
[edit reason] No URL drops please... [/edit]

[The Contractor]

I've used several of the monitoring services in the past from different online sources. They are not accurate when it gets down to the nitty-gritty.

Most services ping a server. Just because a server can be pinged doesn't mean it's serving HTTP requests properly.

Best solution is software available to run from your PC which you set the options such as time, ping or grab a page that you created etc.

I like one called Radar Website Monitor (no affiliation).

[grandpa]

if anybody uses any website monitoring services?

Yes. There was one being used on my site when I assumed the webmaster duties. Is it better than another one? I couldn't say. Does it have value? That's debatable. But, as far as I know it's a free service.

Last Friday my domain went offline for 29 minutes. I was on the phone with the web host long before I got a message from the monitor service. In fact, the monitor could not get a message thru to me as long as the server was down. Hmmmm....

[webtress]

I use one, it helped me document the number if incidents my site was going down. Site was running fine for almost a year then bam for 2 weeks it just kept going down, tech support claimed they saw no problem, then I decided to send them my monitoring report with date,time and other info at which point I was notified that maintenance would be performed on that server. So I guess they can be useful.

[imstillatwork]

for general purposes, netcraft is cool. you can motitor other peoples sites too. and very true a ping does not mean that the application, http, or databse servers are ok.

[caran1]

I am using a free site uptime monitoring service. It records uptime fairly accurately , but the response time for my 3 website (hosted on 3 different servers of different companies) varies from 2 seconds to 18 seconds. Are the monitoring services accurate or do I need to change the webhosts?

[SEOMike]

I had a programmer I know write me a little code that calls an image off of my website. If it serves up the image, it knows my website is working ok. If it 404s, it sends me an email to my cellphone. Pretty slick little script.

varies from 2 seconds to 18 seconds

Surely you're not talking about the time it takes to load your page?! If you are, you need to find a new host!

[merchi]

I don't know what service you were asking about as it was snipped but I use monitoring service called "serviceuptime". I first tried their lifetime free account but 60 minute monitoring is not frequent enough for my site. I now monitor my host every 2 minutes. So far no false alerts and SMS notifications are also good help. The only thing I don't really like is website design. IMHO less graphics would be faster to load.

[merchi]

serviceuptime just added the ability to put uptime stats on the page. There is a button with real time uptime statistics.