How to freely check your site’s uptime status!

You built your site and let it be. Ok, you update it frequently, too… but do you know if all your visitors can reach it any time they want? You can’t just hope for the best. You should check yourself that it is up and running and to save you for the daunting task to hit refresh on your browser… you should better let somebody else do it.

There are several services that one can use to check a site’s uptime. There is SiteUpTime (they sure got the name right huh?) that monitors that your site is alive in 30/60 minutes intervals for free. Sure, there is a paid service for more frequent checks but I wrote “freely” in the post’s title, didn’t I? SiteUpTime can check one domain for free and thats it.

Then.. there is ServiceUpTime (do they know how to pick domain names or what?). One domain for free, checked every 30 minutes.

Pingability is another service that, guess what, checks your site frequently. By frequently I mean every hour or so if you don’t want to pay for their service.

Next one? AreMySitesUp. One check every hour and then you get into the paying zone.

site24x7 is about the same as the rest in relation with their free offerings. 2 sites checked every hour and you get notified by email, sms or rss.

Pingdom is actually a bit better than the above. You can setup one site to check and you can choose as frequent as 1 every minute checks. You can receive unlimited email notifications for down time and they even throw in 20 free sms notifications just to get you started. Pingdom has a nice professional management interface. They offer history of your uptime with nice graphs and all. If you want more sites checked though, guess what… you have to reach for your pocket.

And then there is UpTimeRobot. UpTimeRobot is kind of a new service and kind of a simplistic one too, but… it is completely free and the guys behind it (WebResourcesDepot) say they want to keep it that way (they promise to do so at least until August 2010). You can check up to 50 sites for free and check them every 5 minutes. You can get notifications by email, rss, twitter (coming soon) and by sms for free for many mobile providers supporting email to sms. So, if you just want to be sure your sites are up and don’t need all the fancy stuff… there is UpTimeRobot and it is free for you to use. I’m using it myself for more than 2 months now and it actually works as promised.