Login
Sign In or Register
Not Registered Yet?
Join Now! It's FREE. Get full access and benefit from this site
Join Now! It's FREE. Get full access and benefit from this site
Thursday, 10 June 2010 03:00
Have you ever seen a web host that don’t claims 99.99% up time guarantee? With so much experience with several leading web hosts of industry, what I have realized is that most of them have sub standard services.
Today I am going to tell you my bad experience with one of the leading web hosts of Industry, Dreamhost. After starting with them, I was very happy with their shared servers but things went bad when I moved to Dreamhost PS. My personal tech blog was having so much down times that uptime went to 94% in just 2 weeks and to even surprise you more, it happened after moving to Dreamhost Personal Servers (which are designed to handle big traffic, at least is their words). After so many ticket queries and live chat, there was no solution hence I decided to move to a new web host as Crispy Tech needed a personal server for its traffic.
If you want to keep an eye on your web host, Its very necessary that you use a website monitoring service which notifies you when your website goes down.
Today we have come up with best free website monitoring services which help you to monitor your website. It was easy for me to write an article with 20 website monitoring services but I have only included the best ones which we have actually used before. So let’s start.
Uptime robot is one of the finest and completely free website monitoring services. Co Founded by Umut Muhaddisoglu of WebResourcesDepot, Uptime Robot is our personal choice for monitoring on 1stWD.
The monitoring service has no Premium Plans and their free services are more than enough for any web developer. You can monitor 50 websites for free with options of getting notified with:
Pretty awesome. Right?
Uptime Robot checks your website with regular interval of 5 minutes.
In a talk with Umut, he assured us that Uptime Robot will be free till September 2010 and then they will introduce premium plans (In case if they are unable to continue Free Plan) but free plan will still be there with some modifications. Although the web app is not feature enriched but Its awesome for those who just want the work done with out whistles and bells.
One thing you will fall in love with is the completely Ajaxed interface of Uptime Robot. After signing up, just play with different areas of website and you will enjoy the experience.:)
We would love to see better support for SMS notifications in UpTime Robot. While writing this review, SMS notifications are not supported World Wide. Another awesome feature would be iPhone/ Android App.
Pingdom is by far the most comprehensive and enterprise solution for website monitoring services. With all those nifty and expensive plans they also provide the option of a free website monitoring plan which allows you to monitor one website for free.
Pingdom is the biggest guy in thr world of website monitoring services with customers ranging from of Alexa to Mashable.
Pingdom is feature enriched and has its own free iPhone app. With support of Response time tracking, you can also check how your server reponds when it experiences traffic load.
If you are a big fan of Open Source softwares then Zabbix is for you. Its completely free and licensed under GPL v2 which means you are free to do modifications in the core software and pass it on. There are no proprietary restrictions on you.
Zabbix is such a comprehensive tool that a book has been written on it which covers all of its features. There is no pre-hosted version and you will have to install it yourself after downloading it. The tool is pretty complex and I only suggest it for Advanced users.
With support of email and SMS notifications, Zabbix is another completely free web monitoring service. You can have unlimited monitors active with Basic state. The web app checks your website’s header with regular intervals of 15 Minutes. Though the home page of basicstate don’t gives a professional look but I have personally tested and was using it before I came to know Uptime Robot.
100Pulse is another free website monitoring service which comes with an inituitive user interface. The free plan allows you to monitor the status of two web properties and you will be notified using Twitter, Email and SMS. They also have an option of Google Widget which you can set up on your desktop or iGoogle.
I hope that you liked the article. Which web service do you use for website monitoring? Feel free to share it with us.
