Website Availability Monitoring - any recommendations?

[John]

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I'm looking for a decent service that will monitor URLs across a number of servers, and notify multiple people via email and SMS as soon as one of them goes down.

[D-Mac]

This isn't what your asking for, but it will tell you when your server is down, rather than a general problem somewhere else on the net.

All you need to do is set-up a script to write the date and time to a database at a regular interval. E.g. every 300 seconds. Set the script to restart in the event of a server restart and you will have a simple logfile that contains time gaps when the server was down.

If you want to monitor it remotely you could run the script on a cron job, that sends an email each time it runs, On your monitoring server it would check for the receipt of the emails. If an email fails to arrive, fire off an sms. You will get false alarms occasionally due to network problems, but you can go back to your db logfiles to ascertain if was your server or something else.

Alternatively you could use the monitoring server to scrape the output of the script on the original server. If there is an unexpected delay between updates, fire off an sms.

It would probably take your developer a day or two max to get something set-up.

[BFG 9000]

I've never used it & it looks like it hasn't been updated in a while, but i-Eyes - Professional WebSite Monitoring Tool. 24x7 Server Monitoring. is run by a plethora of guys called Jon who also run the excellent price comparison services at medifusion.


TTFN

BFG

[lethal0r]

I use Uptime, always been spot on for me.

[Seamaster]

I use Free Websites Performance, Availability, Traffic Monitoring at work, its free.

[toast8172]

Hi,
I use Website Monitoring.

you can chose the interval at which is monitors the site (anywhere between 1 minute to 15 minutes), and sends an email and / or SMS if the site does not respond.
I would recommend setting it to only send the SMS if the server does not respond on the second try - I get and email at first failure, and then an email and an SMS if it fails on the second attempt (this stops false positives due to network issues waking me up in the middle of the night )
We monitor our webserver and also our exchange server based in our offices (monitoring the exchange server also means that in the event of a powercut at the office taking our other servers offline we get to hear about it even over the weekend)
They also do a 30 day trial.

Regards
Paul

[Elaine]

We use - this - Website Monitoring Service: Site24x7 - they have a free service, which we use and also a paid one - which I assume is more complex.

[carlos]

I'd second Site 24-7, we pay out for regular by the minute checks.

[John]

Thanks everyone - I've gone for a combination of Uptime and Site24x7 - shouldn't miss a thing!

[honest]

Good prices and great support:

SiteUptime - Website Monitoring Service