Five Free Tools to Check if Your Site is Up
So, you’ve designed and developed a great site that visitors find extremely useful and that search engines love to crawl. You no have no worries, right?
Wrong!
A great site that is search engine friendly and more importantly useful to your visitors serves no purpose if the server struggles and doesn’t keep the site up consistently and reliably. Monitoring your sites for uptime is a crucial aspect of running a successful web-site. If you’re not already keeping track of your site’s uptime, here’s five free tools to check if your site is up and running.
- Down for everyone or just me?
- Pingdom
- Are My Sites Up?
- mon.itor.us
- Binary Canary
You just tried accessing your web-site and it’s not loading. Uh-oh, time to panic? Not quite. The first thing you should check if your site is not loading on your computer is if it’s actually down or if it’s an issue with your Internet Service Provider.
Down for everyone or just me? is a great single-purpose web-site that will check any site on the web and report back if it’s actually down or if it’s just an issue with your internet connection.
While finding out if your site is down for just you or everyone is a great tool, it’s unreasonable to constantly refresh your site and then go and check if it’s really down. Site monitoring tools allow you to set it and forget.
Pingdom is such a tool, where you can point it towards your site(s) or server(s) and if the site goes down you’ll receive an e-mail, text message, or even a tweet or DM that Pingdom had trouble accessing your site. Pingdom can be set to check your site once a minute and it also has tons of graphs that show uptime and load time historically for your site(s).
You can sign up for a free account that will track one site or one server and send up to 20 SMS alerts.
What if you have more than one site but can’t afford a premium Pingdom account? Well, Are My Sites Up? is a great monitoring service that is free and allows you to track up to five sites with 25 daily checks. Are My Sites Up also offers a premium service that allows for more sites and more checks. You can receive alerts via RSS, text message, Twitter, e-mail or via a nifty iPhone application.
Similar to Pingdom, mon.itor.us will track your site’s uptime and offers a plethora of graphs to show site performance over time. The service is completely free and you can receive alerts that your site is down via e-mail, instant message, RSS or SMS.
Last but not least, Binary Canary has a free monitoring account that allows you to watch up to 5 sites at a 15 minute frequency. If the site goes down you can be alerted via e-mail or SMS by e-mail. You can also purchase SMS and phone credits to receive alerts that way.
Ensuring your site stays up is an important aspect of running a successful web-site. With these five free tools, you have no excuse to not monitor your site’s uptime and load time performance. Have you got a favorite free monitoring tool you use to ensure your site is up? Let us know in the comments below.
Tags: free, monitoring, SEO, tools, uptime
Awesome free resources you’ve culled for us, makes blog authors secure in the knowledge about what’s going on in their blogs. Well done!
Glad you found them useful Jan! Monitoring and gathering stats is something all website owners should do. Otherwise, you don’t really know what’s going on with your site and can’t focus on what to improve!
Thanks for the info. I will give it a try.
Useful free tools. I like pingdom. Thanks
how will it be able to tell you if a site is down or not if the problem IS with your internet connection?
This is good. Thanks for sharing.,
Hey, thanks, been looking for some way to monitor uptime for a while now.