Free Site Monitoring – Pingdom

In the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of questions regarding website monitoring, my first choice used to be “AlertFox” as you could go much deeper than just pinging the web server and script actions for the site to follow.

However they’ve[AlertFox] gone to a completely chargeable structure , even though they offer 30 days free, $49 a month is too much for most and I’ve found and cruically used a free alternative.

Pingdom

While they offer the ability to have both Basic accounts at $10 a month and Business accounts at $40, there is a free option (that i use) that allows you to monitor just one site and you can register here https://www.pingdom.com/signup/ (its below the two paid options)

Setting it up is exceptionally easy and I was 50/50 – delighted/concerned when I started getting notifications the other morning to let me know that this site was down.

Here is a screen shot of some of the emails I received:

Pingdom Email AlertObviously I could now go and find out what was up with the host and it turned out one of the switches in the BlueSquare data-centre had died, fair enough, it happens and a data-centre across the road from them had the same issue last year, give them an hour or so and they’d have it sorted and they did.

Top marks to Evo-Hosting by the way, they were already on the ball and as soon as I started looking, they had already communicated the issue and were harassing the data-centre.

Reports

I also just received the monthly report for this site a screen shot is below. They also have reporting on their website, but to be frankly honest I don’t care, up or down, thats all I care about.

pingdom-report-1

Summary

I like free, I know you do too. While not as powerful as the paid options and that found with AlterFox, this works, as I’ve shown above and its free!

While the free account is “basic” it works and for less than 5 minutes work, it was a set-and-forget action.

Stop - Take Action!Have you set yours up yet?
Go here its free! https://www.pingdom.com/signup/

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