If you want to have popular and quality website or personal blog, then monitoring the uptime and performance of your site regularly is as essential as choosing a good web host. After all, even if you have the most reliable web hosting provider, your website may experience downtime and slowness due to various reasons like network outages, power failure, hacker attacks, server overload, or even human errors, etc.
Therefore, no matter how satisfied you are with your web hosting company, you need to keep monitoring your website. Note that the purpose of this practice is to be notified whenever your website goes wrong, and take immediate action to resolve the problems, hence give your site a perfect online performance.
Almost all the monitoring tools run in the background and check your website uptime and page loading speed constantly, so many of our readers have no idea what is the best website uptime and performance monitoring tool. In this circumstance, we have listed 5 best site monitoring tools in the following, with which your website can be checked 24/7 through different ways, protocols and from different locations.
Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the most widely used website monitoring tools, coming with a variety of features like SMS alerts, email alerts, Uptime Reports, Error analysis, Response Time Reports, Multiple checking locations, etc. Generally, people choose the free version which monitors one site with 20 SMS alerts, but if you have multiple websites, then you only need to pay $9.95/mo to have all you website be checked (from5 to 30 sites) with up to 200 SMS alerts. The website is monitored every 5 minutes for free plan, and every 1 minute for the paid plan. Moreover, Pingdom also offers its services via free apps on iOS and Android, so you can check you site on your iPhone or Android phones.
Main Features
SMS, Twitter, Email and In-App Notifications
Over 50 different locations
Keep track of your website’s performance
Available for free on the mobile devices: Android and iOS
The monitoring interval can be as small as 1 minute.
Uptime Robot
Uptime Robot is a really nice monitoring tool which is totally free of charge. It checks your website every 5 minutes to ensure that everything is running smoothly. And If your website goes down or encounters any problem, then you will instantly be alerted instantly via e-mail, SMS, Twitter, RSS or push notifications. Note that you can add up to 50 websites to monitor for free. Besides, Uptime Robot has an Ajax interface, which makes managing monitors, viewing stats and logs an easy thing.
Main Features
User-friendly and informative dashboard
5 minutes check intervals
Add up to 50 sites
Instant Alerts
Site Uptime
SiteUptime is a website monitoring tool which checks your website at regular intervals to ensure your site visitors are able to reach your website at any time of the day. One your site become inaccessible, then it will notify you via email or SMS. It offers both free and paid version. While the free version allows you to monitor one website every 30 or 60 minutes, the paid version allows to add up to 6 websites, and check your site every in every 5 minutes. All the monitoring options includes monthly reports, online statics, user friendly control panel, 4 monitoring locations, as well as HTTP, POP3, SMTP, FTP, SSL, DNS, custom TCP Ports, ping, HTTP Password Protection.
Main Features
Protocol based tests
Sends alerts by email and SMS
Detailed reports
Multiple plans: Free, Premium, and Advanced
Montastic
Montastic claims to offer “the free website monitoring service that doesn’t suck.” Due to the fact that it has multiple monitoring locations in US, so it might be best for sites that have American audiences. With Montastic website monitoring tool, you can be notified via e-mail when your website goes down, and when it goes back up. While offering free plan and paid plan, Montastic allows free plan customers to monitor up to 3 sites with check interval of 30 minutes, and paid plan customers to have more sites with monitoring interval of 5 minutes. Besides, this monitoring tool allows every customer to read statuses via RSS, Mac, PC, Android widgets and API, and it supports HTTP, HTTPs and any other port number.
Main Features
Monitoring done from multiple locations (all in U.S.)
Email, and RSS alerts.
Verify presence or absence of keyword on a web page
Support for HTTP authentication
Checkpoint statuses available via RSS
Color coded icons with full screen capability
Are My Sites Up?
The monitoring service offered by Are My Sites Up checks up to five of your sites as frequently as once per minute, with unlimited email and SMS notifications (in the US, International SMS is available), as well as the HTML status error code to help you know why your site has gone offline. The only drawback is that it does not offer free plan, but 2 paid plans called Turbo ($8/mo) and Premium ($35/mo). However, you can have a try with the 15 days free trial on both the 2 plans to test the monitoring service by yourself.
Main Features
Personalized Client Portal
Uptime and Response Statistics
Keyword search
Email & Voice Phone call notifications
White label or custom iPhoneapp