Monitor Uptime/Downtime of your Website/Blog for Free!

Here’s an interesting service Aaron Silber sent over to me.  It’s a great cloud service to monitor your Websites.  The first site you monitor is free.  I  tried it out and was really pleased with the results (and price!) . 😉

You basically sign up for the monitoring service on PingDom and point it to a website under your control.  From there, you can set the frequency that it will monitor the site and the notification methods you would like to use.  I run a couple websites from the basement and occasionally due to power surges/brownouts,  the VMs reboot causing some downtime.  PingDom alerts me almost immediately!  It is very cool and slick.

First I receive a quick email alert notifying me that the site is down :
Pingdom Alert DOWN:
Family WebSite (www.xxxx.com) is down since 11/17/2010 05:00:36PM.

I also installed the handy iPhone application which will give me a push notification right on the phone. Finally, the PingDom website gave me additional detail on the outage.

Once the site was back up and running, PingDom gave me an ALL Clear message.  Nice!

Definitely worth checking out and setting up if you are even remotely responsible for a website and it’s uptime.