Anyone used a free website monitoring service?

[Textpert123]

There are a lot of free website monitoring services, e.g.,pingdom.com, but what good are they? They seem do just do a ping on the server, which I don't think works for a URL to a website on a shared server( my website is on a shared server and when I ping it the reply is that it cannot be detected, yet I can browse to the website). On the other hand, ping works for the server, but don't hosting companies monitor their servers?

So what good is a free service that just pings? Maybe it is just a way to get you to buy their premium services?

[Jonesy]

DIY: nagios

[Textpert123]

Thanks, but that does not answer the question. I'll ask it another way:

Does ping work with a url to a website that is on a shared server? Pinging the ones I have tried, like my own, always time out even though I can browse to them.

[Mokita]

InternetSeer has a free service where their server requests the HEAD of your home page once per hour and emails you if it is unreachable. They keep testing every 5 or 10 mins after that and email you when it is working again.

They send a summary report once per week detailing any detected outages and also the connect time.

Obviously if an outage occurs and is rectified between the hourly checks, you will not know. But for a free service it is pretty useful.

[lammert]

Ping may be blocked by the firewall of your hosting company. Therefore ping requests can fail even though the URL requests work.

On the other hand, if ping would have worked, it is still not a good indication that your site is working. Your Apache/ISS server program may have crashed, or the server may be under severe load, sending 503 HTTP errors to many of the visitors. The only way to check this is a real HTTP checker which tests if the returned page is complete, and has the right status code (200).

[Textpert123]

Thanks, lammert, that's exactly the information I was looking for. I was not interested in using a service to monitor my website, but some of the replies got me curious so I looked in to a few of them. It seems that the business model of these services is flawed. I do not see how they can do what they claim for their fees and be profitable. They claim they have servers around the world to monitor their thousands of website customers. They also need e-mail servers. Then there all the free accounts. The personnel to manage all that alone would keep them from breaking even. My guess is that what they are actually doing is not the pictue they paint.

[CMidd]

i use pingdom and monitor us and have been using them for years. They check you homepage once an hour and send you an email.

both free and good.

it's not expensive to create a remote monitoring service LOL. You can create one for less them $100 bucks a month.

5 shared hosting accounts in different part of the world. script to request a page, php mail send. That's it.

you could easily monitor 100,000 site at 1 hit per hour.

the script only check for http response code 200 "less then 1k bytes".

[incrediBILL]

It seems that the business model of these services is flawed. I do not see how they can do what they claim for their fees and be profitable. They claim they have servers around the world to monitor their thousands of website customers.

You need to learn a bit more about the technology before jumping to such conclusions.

I use SiteUpTime, have for years, it's deadly accurate, have almost instant notification when my sites or servers go down within 5 minutes of the incident and have never gotten a false positive.

FYI, their free account doesn't even offer PING, it only offers HTTP requests.

Servers around the world is no big deal either, I can get a set of peered dedicating hosting servers for $99/ea. (or sometimes less!) in multiple data centers. You really only need a couple of high end servers to do the bulk of your testing and contact the other servers to validate a failure to make sure it's showing as failed on multiple networks and backbones. Pretty trivial stuff really.

[CMidd]

IncrediBill Good Plan!


now to think of it, you wouldn't even need servers in different parts of the world, just access a proxy servers that send request from different part of the world.

proxy servers in US, China, UK, and maybe a few location in the US and Uk.

I have a ad server on a godaddy shared daddy hosting account and it can easily handle well over 25,000,000 impressions a month, so a couple million http request per month wouldn't be nothing.

24 ping a day per site
50,000 sites
1.2 million request per day at about 100 mb of data in whole.

you would send at minimum a few thousands emails a day.

on a shoe string budget you could do this for less then $100 per month.

might even be a good business model if you monetized with ads, or affiliate products. Send out a monthly newletter with featured products, services, training course, etc.

Think about it You're building a list of concerned webmaster with valuable web properties "must be valuable if they want it monitored".

also in each failure email send them an affiliate offer to try a new more reliable host LMAO.