Monitor a site’s downtime…for free!

You have a really cool website that you or someone else designed, right?  That’s great but it doesn’t do you much good if the site is down.  Nobody can get to it and learn about your product or service, or even worse, buy something from you if it’s an ecommerce site.

I know, it’s hosted by someone and they monitor it, right?  Probably not.  You can check with them, but most hosts don’t monitor sites by default.  In many cases you should consider an external monitoring service.

There are many out there, and some good ones at that.  However if you are small with limited resources, some of them may offer way more than you need, which of course usually means they have a hefty monthly fee.

If it sounds like I’m speaking directly to you, then I recommend that you check out UptimeRobot.  This is a free external monitoring tool that will check your site every five minutes and send you an email, text message, twitter notification, and more.  What’s even better is that it will allow you to specify up to 50 monitors in total.

So I don’t want to take away from the great paid monitoring sites out there.  UptimeRobot also doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that many of them have.  However, you also don’t want to miss out on something that’s completely free!