Server/website monitoring

[Taresa]

Was it Dave who had posted information about monitoring the box his stuff was on?

I'd like to start a thread for talking about the pros and cons of different monitoring services.

What do you use?
How old is it?
How did you implement it?
What's good about it?
What do you wish they'd change?

[Ziggyff]

I`m also very interested in this information. It has current importance for me. Can you give some details

[Whosdad]

Yes, my old host had an e-mail alert system of any issues system wide that I found useful :).
Any one else?

[redsox9]

For those on BlueHost:

http://serverstatus.bluehost.com/

[sXi]

For simply checking website availability from your PC, Site Up is pretty cool:
http://www.xequte.com/other/index.html#siteup

freewebmonitoring.com have an hourly check with email notification.
^ Signup required*

[instantnet]

websitepulse.com has been pretty good.

they had a 15 minute ping monitoring service at one time for $1 now I see it is $3

If anyone knows of any other sites please list them

I am also looking for a cheap software package that will monitor and send you an email when it is down or not responding.

Whatsupgold is pretty expensive from what I hear right?

[Ferdinand]

I use the free version of ServiceUptime (http://www.serviceuptime.com/). It pings my website every 30 min. from different servers around the world.

[felgall]

www.freewebmonitoring.com
www.internetseer.com

[instantnet]

internetseer.com is garbage they send you so much junk mail.

freewebmonitoring.com = 60 minute monitoring

There must be software monitoring tools that are inexpensive for the masses.

[felgall]

I don't remember getting junk mail from Internetseer. There are a few ads in with the weekly report but apart from that one email a week the only emails I get from them are notifications of my site going down and coming back up.

I haven't seen a free monitoring service offering anything more frequent than hourly checks but they don't all perform their hourly checks at the same time each hour so if you sign up with several free hourly services then your site will be checked several times each hour just by different services. If you need to know more accurately than that as to when your site goes down then you probably ought to have the site on its own server so as to minimize the downtime in the first place.

If you are getting junk mail from ANYWHERE then you don't have your spam filtering set correctly.

[instantnet]

you may want to search your email box again

their weekly email report on service is justified, it is just cluttered beyond belief with al the junk they are putting in it...

then they send emails from "IS eBusiness"

Screenshots
http://img.drlinky.com/gallery/24

[felgall]

Actually, I think it is several months since I last saw a weekly report from Internetseer. I think the only emails I have actually seen from them recently are those reporting when my site went down and came back up during this week's upgrade. My spam filtering must be removing all the others.

[hagan29]

Hi,

I use website monitoring (http://www.observepoint.com/) software from observerpoint.com

It's not free but best in web monitoring.

[Chairmonkee]

For a while, I was using the free 'Uptime Button' on Uptrends.com (http://www.uptrends.com). This checks your site every 30 minutes and doesn't cost anything. You can get pretty basic stats broken down by day/week/month/year in a graphical form.

However, since I manage a fairly high traffic e-commerce site, I needed a lot more detailed information/statistics, page load time info and the ability to monitor an e-commerce transaction.

And just like someone else just said a minute ago, I also needed to be notified in realtime whenever the site goes down; preferably by text message, but email would work too (since most US cell carriers allow you to receive emails as text messages 4155551212@verizon.net for example).

And as much as I like 'free', the reality is that to get the kind of tool I wanted, I had to break down and buy something. So, I ended up scrapping the Uptime Button and just buying the paid service from Uptrends; I chose their 'Enterprise' product since it checks my site every 5 minutes and has just about every bell and whistle you could want. And the price is pretty low considering the quality of product.

Moreover, in all my hunting around online, I have never read a single negative comment about their product or company, and customer support has been solid.

[InternetSeer]

Hi folks - Jeff here from Internetseer.

As part of our free 60 minute monitoring, subscribers agree to receive 1 promotional email per week and you also receive 1 weekly performance report each week. The weekly performance report contains your uptime stats for the prior 7 days and if your website is ranked in the top 500,000 sites, the weekly performance report also includes your Alexa Rankings for the prior week, prior month and prior 90 days. We send all emails ourselves from our servers and never disclose our subscribers email addresses to any other businesses, companies or third parties. We value the relationship we have with our subscribers. We've been offering Free website monitoring since 1999. We are located in suburban Philadelphia and have monitoring servers located around the world.

The advertising emails and ads in the weekly performance reports are how we cover the costs of offering Free Monitoring.

InternetSeer is the largest website monitoring company in the world, monitoring over 1.4 million websites every hour. All alert notifications are verified by remote checking servers located in different countries before any error alerts are sent.

Thanks and Kudo's to Blue Host - they run a great hosting service. We know - we advertise for them and we keep track of all the hosting companies IP address blocks and in terms of up time they are great - believe me when I tell you that many are not very good at all.