Not necessarily the most catchy of titles, but nonetheless.
If you’re running your own web server, you want to make sure your websites are accessible by your visitors. That way when they show up, they don’t get a time out error or the dreaded ‘page not found’ screen.
For those who are particularly crafty, I’m sure you could write a little script that pings your sites to make sure they’re up. Or if you feel the need to check on your sites 30 times a day, that works too.
For me, I like Are My Sites Up. Are My Sites Up is a great little service that polls your websites every so often to make sure they’re working. If not, it sends you a text message and an email so you can fix things!
This is particularly nice because my personal phone doesn’t get email (and it’s that way for a reason!). But I do want to know when my sites are down!
So anyway, if you need simple website monitoring, check out AreMySitesUp.com. They have a free account which is full featured, so no need to pay money if you only have a couple sites!
Do you know of any other services like this? If so, leave a comment. I’ll add them and a link to your site in this post!
Good article on AMSU - you may also want to look at binarycanary.com, which offers free 15 minute checking, or 1 minute checking for $5 per month. High frequency checking is very important for critical websites!