Am thinking of getting a service to help me monitor my sites and to alert me once any of them goes down. Would you guys be able to recommend which online monitoring service is best? Free is of course preferable
basicstate.com is really good its free and has a good overview (the black oldschool layout is the only con)
Free service is usually allowing you to check in 30-60 minutes once only, so it's not very good if you want to know the downtime immediately. Hyperspin is a good service. Pingdom is another good source too.
I have mostly experience with monitoring services specialized on web hosting nich but this one is good for any website: http://www.siteuptime.com/
I would recommend you go with a great host then you have no worries. They have your site monitored and get cell phone and other alerts if they go down. If you have to use a monitoring service can I ask what hosting you are using.
That is good point. Anyway, when you sign up for a new web host it is always good idea to make some uptime tests.
I'm a big fan of pingdom we've been using them for close to two years. They're not free, but usually have excellent coupons around the internet for the first year. So you could potentially get the first year for say $30. That's 1 minute monitoring which a lot of other services do not offer unless you're willing to pay quite a bit.
I love wormly.com, there are three reasons of liking them. First, they allow health monitoring (Monitor your server parameters and send email if any of the service crosses the bound), second, they send notification via MSN messenger, SMS, email and RPC as well and third, they have multi server monitoring, this allows the server to be checked from different continents (Like US,EU,AS,AU etc). Most importantly, their uptime is proved to be more than superb. So you should be able to try them without any problem
Check your host. They may have things setup already. And do you by chance have secondary hosting account? You can setup the service as a cron on both servers to check against each other. IMHO paying for this type of service is pointless. You can get a cheap hosting account instead and run a script yourself. You'll get more use and have more control.
Agreed. I have always been a fan of Nagios and Cacti in combination. Gives you performance metrics from cacti, and accurate uptime of services with real time alerting from nagios.
I'd recommend WebSitePulse.com, probably the most customizable service out there. The have 30 free trial to use all of their options with no payment info needed.