High availability is paramount for any website or web application; users encountering persistent issues accessing content are unlikely to return. For web applications, poor uptime can erode user confidence in your product, leading them to seek alternative solutions. Ensuring constant accessibility for your sites and web apps is essential. This article provides a selection of free and practical website monitoring tools to help you detect when your website or web application becomes inaccessible.
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[Image: Site24x7]
Sites24x7 is an intuitive website monitoring tool for tracking your website or web application’s availability. It tests uptime across multiple global locations, including Singapore, the Netherlands, and New Jersey, ensuring your site is served optimally in major global regions.
[Image: Are My Sites Up?]
Are My Sites Up? is a straightforward free website monitoring software that alerts you when your websites are down. It allows you to monitor up to five websites, receive email and text message alerts, and checks your sites 25 times a day.
[Image: mon.itor.us]
Update: mon.itor.us has merged with Monitis.
[Image: Montastic]
Montastic is a free, quick, and easy-to-use tool for maintaining awareness of your websites’ availability. Developed by Metadot, Montastic sends alerts via email, RSS, or Windows and Mac widgets whenever your site crashes or recovers. It supports monitoring up to 100 sites per account and offers monitoring for HTTP and HTTP Secure connections.
[Image: ServerMojo]
ServerMojo is a user-friendly service for monitoring your web server’s uptime, alerting you via IM, Twitter, and email when your site is unavailable. It allows monitoring of one site at one-hour intervals.
[Image: HostTracker]
HostTracker is a free web tool for monitoring site availability, allowing you to monitor up to two websites simultaneously. It provides free weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports on your web server’s performance, distributed monitoring, on-site availability for diagnostics, and alerts via email, IM, and/or SMS.
[Image: Observu]
Observu is a simple tool designed for rapid setup and ease of use. It allows you to monitor an unlimited number of websites/web servers, making it an excellent choice for multi-site owners seeking a hassle-free way to keep track of their web properties.
[Image: InternetSeer]
InternetSeer offers a free standard service with 60-minute intervals for monitoring your site’s uptime and performance. It provides site availability and page response time reports, real-time error notifications, and weekly reports on server performance for diagnostics.
[Image: FreeSiteStatus]
FreeSiteStatus is a web-based application that offers email alerts for your site’s downtime, a 60-minute monitoring interval, and a distributed monitoring network across 13 global locations. It includes a “Quick Test” tool for instantly checking your site services’ performance and availability.
[Image: SiteUptime]
SiteUptime is a free tool that allows you to monitor one site at 30 or 60-minute intervals from four geographical locations. It supports monitoring of HTTP (web server), POP3 (email server), FTP server, and more, and offers the option to display availability statistics publicly, which can be used as a site widget to showcase your site or web application’s high availability.
[Image: Basic State]
Basic State is a freeware website monitoring tool for uptime, server, and network failures. It checks your website every 15 minutes and sends notifications via email or text message when issues arise. With a simple sign-up process and the ability to monitor any number of sites, Basic State is a solid option for site monitoring tools.
[Image: Livewatch]
Livewatch allows you to receive alerts when your site is unavailable via email, SMS, phone, IM, and even Twitter. It can record and create PDF reports for site failures, enabling you to document and troubleshoot downtime events. It also includes a simple web tool called Free HTTP Check for quickly checking your web server’s availability.
Do you have a tool not on the list that you use for your sites and applications? Do you have positive or negative experiences with the tools featured here? Please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.
[Related categories: Tools, Web Applications, and Web Development]
