I found a neat service for you. It does not just monitor one site for you as some of these free uptime monitors do.
BasicState.com lets you monitor all of your sites and as they say at the site it is “free forever”. I’ve just added all my sites to their free uptime monitoring service.
From now on, every 15 minutes they check them all and email (or SMS) me with any problems.
An impressive service indeed. And it is FREE. The only negative, if you call it that, is that you have to enter your sites one at at time. There is no mass import facility.
Highly recommended.
They also monitor PayPal, ClickBank and a host of other affiliate and payment services. You get get an alert when these go offline too.
Gary
PS: While writing this, I got 2 alerts for 2 of my sites which are down so I’ve just emailed my web host with details. How are YOUR sites doing right now?
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UPDATE
Two days later, I’m less happy with BasicState.
It’s too quick to email me about a site being
down. When I click through to check, the
site is usually displaying just fine.
If only they (or better still, we users) could
make it slow down before firing off an alert
email, it would be a very sweet app.
Currently it’s bordering on a nuisance.
If you know of a better solution (free, please)
do let us know.
Thanks
Gary
Well, yes there is a way to hold off. Look in the settings for your alerts and change the setting to any delay you like.
The repeat interval can also be set to a value of your liking.
During that period, there were also routing problems at the data center. So, it is always possible that the failure was due to the testing service being unable to reach out intermittently.
That is unfortunate, but a false alert is better than no alert under most circumstances. Sort of like double checking that the stove is off before leaving the house. Better safe than sorry. :)
Just to clarify the alert delay thing. If your site tests good before the alert is sent, the alert is cancelled. Given the testing cycle of 15 minutes, a good delay would be 20 minutes.
Spenser, thanks for coming on on this one.
Your advice is appreciated.
I logged in, and went to ‘Alert setup’ and changed the Wait box from 0 to 20 minutes.
Was this what you had in mind?
Thanks.
I will update with a new post when I see the results of this change.
Gary
Hi Gary,
As a matter of fact, yes.
By doing that, the sytem gets a second chance to see that you are really down.
I notice also that the period mentioned was during the time of the cogent/telia depeering. That depeering caused a whole lot of grief for many sites.
I should also mention that the alert means that the system could not get a valid response within 10 seconds at that *particular* moment in time. There are more sites than you think that have spotty responses due to overload.
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