Tracking website availability?

[TA Message Board]

Does anybody know of a free service that tracks a website's uptime/downtime?

I seem to remeber a site from a few years ago, but cannot find it again.

Our webhost (IPS Hosting) has become very unreliable over the past few weeks and our website is going up and down like a yo-yo.

[HeresJonny]

Not free, but for less than a fiver a month there is www.i-eyes.com. There's an affiliate program for it too on Affiliate Future. I use it to monitor about 120 web sites.

Jon

[Keith]

Theres Website Availability on POR http://www.websiteavailability.com

[TA Message Board]

Thanks for the suggestions. Only one website to check, and I don't want to spend any cash on it. Signed up on this website for their free checking every 30 mins

http://www.siteuptime.com

I'm going to have a wee look for a program I can run on my own PC that will track uptime. Should be possible.

[ChrisM]

I use this:

http://www.internetseer.com/home/index.xtp

The free option is at the bottom.

HTH

Chris

[daveh]

Originally posted by TA Message Board Thanks for the suggestions. Only one website to check, and I don't want to spend any cash on it. Signed up on this website for their free checking every 30 mins http://www.siteuptime.com I'm going to have a wee look for a program I can run on my own PC that will track uptime. Should be possible.

I use siteuptime amd found them to be reliable. They did have an issue with their global location monitoring but that was fixed quite a few months back.

I use the premium service for $5 (£2.60) a month but the free service runs on the same system just at different durations.

One thing to remember though, if you site is down for only a few seconds at the time the siteuptime monitoring occurs, it will report it as down and rightly so. However, the next check isn't for another 30mins and therefore your site downtime will be reported as 30mins!

If its a free service you don't mind, just remember that for when your monthly uptime report comes in.

[Shane]

" program I can run on my own PC that will track uptime"

yup they do exist...

I had a program somewhere on a CD off a magazine that monitored sites from your desktop.. cool if ur pc is on 24/7 ..

will have a look for it

[TA Message Board]

Shane if you could remember the name of that program or find the CD that would be great.

Had a look at a utility called T4eWebPing - it is a command line program that will "ping" a web page. Returns amongst other things such as response time, error code if any etc, but it's output isn't in a usable form.

The PC in my work is on 24/7 so I run stuff from there. Great for phpadsnew maintenance etc

[daveh]

http://www.serverscheck.co.uk/download.asp

[TA Message Board]

Thanks for all the suggestions. After looking at them all, I wrote a batch file. It doesn't allert me to when there's downtime, but it does let me track it.

Runs as a scheduled task on my PC every 11 mins. Wget is a free utility that grabs a web page and downloads it - I use it for running PHPadsnew maintenance. Once the file is downloaded, I delete it.

echo %date%,%time%, >> "C:\Program Files\wget\check_Tamb.txt"
c:
cd "\Program Files\wget\download"
"C:\Program Files\wget\wget" http://tamb.ipbhost.com/index.php -Y on -nv -a "C:\Program Files\wget\check_Tamb.txt"
echo ; >> "C:\Program Files\wget\check_Tamb.txt"
del index*.* /q

This produces the following file. A quick search and replace in word to format it correctly. Think the numbers in square brackets is the response time. The downtime shows as blank lines

06/03/2005,11:53:00.04, 
11:53:00 URL:http://tamb.ipbhost.com/index.php [29508] -> "index.php" [1]
; 
06/03/2005,12:04:00.04, 
; 
06/03/2005,12:15:00.04, 
; 
06/03/2005,12:26:00.04, 
; 
06/03/2005,12:37:00.06, 
12:41:12 URL:http://tamb.ipbhost.com/index.php [1601] -> "index.php" [13]
; 
06/03/2005,12:48:00.04, 
12:48:00 URL:http://tamb.ipbhost.com/index.php [28628] -> "index.php" [1]