Free website monitoring services: montastic.com, mon.itor.us, internetvista.com
There are several online services that warn you when your website is down or too slow. Here are three free services I tried (”free as in “freemium“). Feel free to add your findings or experiences…
Mon.itor.us
- mon.itor.us has a bafflingly beautiful self-updating dashboard with response time graphs and reports…
- notification via (one or more) e-mail addresses and rss
- they also have web and desktop dashboard widgets, and offer visitor tracking (you need to embed a snippet of javascript code) as an extra
- build your dashboard by adding your collection of modules - in the same ajaxy way as a lot of personal startpages (Netvibes, Google/ig…) do nowadays. Have a look at the demo
- the paying version of mon.itor.us is at monitis.com
Montastic.com
- Montastic really is as easy as you see in the screenshot… you add websites … sites are checked every 10 (!) minutes, you get an email when they’re down
- widgets for desktop notifications here as well
- on the other hand: the information provided is really basic: nothing more than “Website status: unreachable“. Slow page loads (+ a few seconds) trigger a notification - so I get a lot of notifications due to the often slow database connections at Dreamhost …
- ironically, Montastic.com was down itself at the time I wanted to take screenshots last weekend :-) - but that was the first time as far as I know!
- Montastic is completely free - there’s no upgrade plan. It’s built by a bunch of enthousiasts
Internetvista.com
- Internetvista has been around for some time and is the oldest of the 3 services
- the free version is limited to website monitoring with email notification
- main advantage: check for a specific phrase in (the first 4 kb of) your output. This makes sure you get notified when your website performance is ok - but the pages produce nothing but error messages instead of the expected content.
[tags]hosting, performance, monitoring, analytics, statistics, tracking, testing, ping, http, website, server, montastic, internetvista, mon.itor.us, uptime[/tags]
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April 18th, 2007 at 07:57
You might also want to try http://site24×7.com
Site24×7 is a feature-rich website monitoring service. It has a free version as well as a paid version. The free version lets you monitor up to 2 websites. For monitoring more than 2 sites, you need to use the paid version.
April 18th, 2007 at 09:19
Thanks for the roundup pascal. I already knew montastic, but after reading this article i’m going to give Mon.itor.us a chance
May 9th, 2007 at 09:35
At the moment, we’re already a bit sceptical about the Dreamhost uptime. Now we can see if it’s worth the trouble to move all our real estate to a more reliable service.
Thanks for this lineup!
May 9th, 2007 at 09:42
As far as I have experience with it (mainly http://slforum.be) Dreamhost’s main problem is that databases are on a different machine… db connections are _really_ slow. (Pre)caching could help (if it makes sense for your particular app).
May 14th, 2007 at 14:46
Another quite new (and might I add funny in a way) one is http://monitwitter.com/. I think you can guess how it works by looking at the name ;)
May 14th, 2007 at 19:39
Quite happy with http://host-tracker.com/ myself.
Every minute checks possible and a nice uptime button if you feel like it.
May 18th, 2007 at 18:15
[...] Dankuwel, Clopin! [...]
June 19th, 2007 at 13:33
Give http://site24×7.com a try. Its worthful trying
December 19th, 2007 at 15:06
Now http://www.monitis.com is offering Christmas special sales and you can subscribe for Basic and Plus plans with 50% sale.
December 28th, 2007 at 13:16
You may try http://www.monitority.com, with a promotion for Year basic account for free.
January 16th, 2008 at 14:41
Site24×7 is currently offering a special flat 40% discount on its paid plans. Visit http://site24×7.com for details.
January 17th, 2008 at 15:22
Hello,
Effectively we provide a evaluation account (unlimited features but limited to 1 month) and free account (limited to http monitoring but unlimited in the time).
Our strength is the service and the support we deliver to our customer… Don’t hesitate to try it !!!
January 17th, 2008 at 15:23
I just forgot to mention that our service is: internetVista (http://www.internetVista.com)
April 8th, 2008 at 01:06
Another service worth trying is http://www.easysitecheck.com
Free service has 15 minute checking frequency - more frequent than many.
October 15th, 2008 at 00:50
http://www.willemijns.com/monitor.htm
May 20th, 2009 at 12:56
Hi till now i had been using http://100pulse.com.It is also a powerful website monitor with Up/Downtime monitor,IP tracer,Location Finder etc.These tools are free in this website.
Anyways thanks for the different websites and different ideas.Let me try those stuffs.
This blog is really interesting.
May 20th, 2009 at 13:00
Sorry i had typed “.i”t along with the website in above comment. Here is the correct one http://100pulse.com .
Friends try it.Its free.
May 23rd, 2009 at 20:09
Seriously - anyone looking for a high quality website (and device) monitoring solution should check out http://binarycanary.com. They offer free 15 minute monitors PLUS paid 1 minute monitors starting at $5/month. Great graphs, detailed history for a year, they’ve got it all.