Keep track of website uptime with Pingdom
I’m sure most people who have a website of some kind are interested in knowing that their site is up and running at all times, and would like to be notified if the site should be unavailable.
Ideally your web host would be able to guarantee 100 % uptime, but in practice that can be hard for anyone to live up to. I know from personal experience that all sorts of strange and unfortunate events can lead to a site being temporarily offline.
So, website owners want some way of monitoring the status of their site, and to be notified if it should be offline or not responding properly. But how? Well, one handy online tool that helps with that is Pingdom (based in Sweden, yay!), which I have been using for some time now to keep track of any downtime.
Pingdom works by pinging your site from servers around the world at an interval you specify in your account’s control panel. As soon as a problem is detected, you are notified, either by email or by SMS.
You can also view reports when you log into your Pingdom account. I haven’t experienced any downtime problems lately, so my report for July 2007 isn’t very exciting to look at:
Even if you have a stable host it’s nice to know that someone is always checking in on your site. And since the data is saved in the report you could use it if you need to argue with a bad host or something.
A Pingdom account is USD 9.95 per month. For that price you can monitor up to five sites and receive 20 SMS alerts. There is also a free 30-day trial.
In addition to the monitoring service, there is Pingdom Tools, which is planned to become a set of free utilities you can use to check various aspects of your site. At the time of this writing the tools available are Full page test, which measures the load time and size of a page and each object referenced from the page, including images, CSS files, JavaScript files, etc, and Ping and Traceroute, which checks network response time.
Here’s a screenshot of a Full page test report for 456bereastreet.com:
There are other ways of getting hold of that information, but Pingdom’s Full page test gives you a nice overview and can help you see which parts of your site could use a bit of trimming.
If your business relies on your site being available at all time, or if you, like many bloggers, are obsessed with knowing exactly what is going on with your site 24 hours a day, give Pingdom a try.
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About the author
Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
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Comments
A similar alternative service that I've been using and loving is http://mon.itor.us/
Best of all--it's FREE!
I use Pingdom and mon.itor.us and both are excellent tools that reliably inform you when a sites got a problem. They both do pretty much exactly the same thing but personally I prefer Pingdom just for the extra reports it gives you. For those in the UK looking for more in depth stats also check out http://www.axzona.com - its not cheap but a lot more comprehensive (disclaimer: yes I do work for them but not in sales!, I'm currently developing our new front-end...and please no abuse about the site - its not my work!)
We are using Nagios running on Ubuntu
It is amazing! (and open source)
Their site is down. So I guess all their services are reporting an outache of all their sites at the moment...
Pingdom seems real nice, I'll give it a try. eWebCounter is another nice free tool to get real–time statistics for those of us obsessed with our blogs/sites.
Pingdom really looks like to fit my needs, however, neither the Full Page Test (times out every time, no matter which URL I try) nor the registration (claims a missing street address, however it is there) works for me.
Anybody else with these problems?
Statcounter is the best available tool online, ialso use it for SEO in the client websites as a feedback to track visitors...
Free alternative: Montastic. Simple tool that does a good job, including feeds and email notifications.
Hi budy Pingdom seems real nice, I'll give it a try. eWebCounter is another nice free tool to get real–time statistics for those of us obsessed with our blogs/sites.
Pingdom is a cool tool I use it at work every day.
Carmelo Lisciotto
www.carmelolisciotto.com
We are using Nagios running on Ubuntu Too. Statcounter is the best available tool online, ialso use it for SEO in the client websites as a feedback to track visitors...
I signed up for a free trial with Pingdom at the weekend and after registering I was offered the opportunity to upgrade to a paying account with a 70% discount. Seeing as Roger and others have recommended the service I didn't think I had much to lose paying just $35.82 for a full year!
Thought others might be interested.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.