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.