By This is a guest post by Young Yang. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
However good your web hosting might be, sooner or later you will have some downtime. It happens to all of us. If you can be the first to know when your site goes down, though, the problem will be much smaller, because you will be able to contact the customer support and hopefully solve the issue before most readers even notice it. Below you will find 5 tools that can help you with that.
1. Pingdom
You are able to use Pingdom to check your web hosting every 5 minutes, and when your blog is down, Pingdom will notice you via Email, SMS or even Twitter. But, only one website can be monitored for free account. So, if you have two or more websites, you can upgrade to a premium account, or put all your websites in the same web hosting, or use other free similar services mentioned below.
2. Binary Canary
With Binary Canary free services, you are able to select the detecting frequency as 15 min, 30 min or 60 min. You are able to monitor 5 websites, and when the websites are down, you will receive email alerts, no SMS alert.
3. Are My Sites Up
As a free user, your website will be checked every 1 hour. You are able to monitor 5 websites, to manage your account easily with iPhone, and to receive unlimited SMS alerts. But there are some ads on your dashboard, and there is no detailed report.
4. Hyperspin
Hyperspin support multiple languages and multiple monitoring locations (but it didn’t say how many). For free account, the websites will be detected every 60 minutes, and you will receive an email alert when the websites are down, no SMS alert.
5. AlertX
When registering a free account in AlertX, you are able to monitor 1 website, which will be auto-detect every 3 hours. When the website is down, you will receive an email alert, no SMS alert is available.
Are the free services offered by the above 5 websites workable for you? Please share your comments if you have any other similar services.
You can read more from Young Yang on his blog, Freenuts.com.