By Douglas Hanna

Uptime monitoring. Those two words are words that some hosts dread and others love. Customers seem to love them and don’t hesitate to ask for refunds and service credits because of the data that uptime monitoring services provide.

The point of using an uptime monitoring service is to a) see how your host is doing and b) deal with issues if your web site goes down.

A good uptime monitoring service will notify you if your web site (or if one of its services – more about that later) goes down. That way, you can deal with it immediately. Then, at the end of the week, month, etc., the services will send you a report. The report will usually tell you how much (or how little) downtime your site experienced.

There are a lot of uptime monitoring services and companies. Which one is the best? Perhaps more relevant – which one is the best for you?

Major Players: Hosted Solutions
A hosted uptime monitoring company is a company that manages all the technical hassles of uptime monitoring for you. There’s no need to install or troubleshoot software, they take care of notifying you, and everything hopefully works smoothly.

There are literally hundreds of uptime monitoring services and companies. The industry is very competitive and it is hard to set yourself apart. Some of the major services are:

• Alertra
• SiteUptime
• Pingdom
• Website Pulse

Alertra

Alertra calls itself “The Uptime Company.” They are one of the biggest players in the uptime monitoring industry and offer a lot of possible solutions to perspective customers. For a price, the company will monitor basically everything for you. They can monitor any service (FTP, MySQL, HTTP, etc.) and are able to alert you via SMS, email, phone call, numeric page, etc. when something goes wrong. Depending on how often you want their service to check your web site, pricing ranges from just a few dollars a month to several hundred dollars a month. A free trial is available.

SiteUptime

SiteUptime is another major company in the industry. Their plans and options are cheaper and more straight forward than Alertra’s. Like Alertra, they can monitor basically any service or port you’d like and can notify you in a lot of different ways. Plans range from free to $10 a month. For a small company/web site, the $10 a month plan is more than enough and a pretty good deal.

Pingdom

Pingdom is the Web 2.0-esque uptime monitoring company. For $9.95 a month, they will check your site every minute from six separate locations. The company offers an extensive control panel and plenty of extra services for more demanding customers. Perspective customers can take advantage of the company’s 30 day free trial.

Website Pulse

Website Pulse is another uptime monitoring company with a lot of options. Plans range from $5 per month and go up from there. The company has an extensive feature set and can check most services at varying times and frequencies. Like the other companies, Website Pulse has a 30 day free trial.

Smaller Contenders

Other companies that I have read good things about and are probably worth a look are Host-Tracker and Uppanel. Both companies provide free and paid services to help monitor your web site’s uptime and reliability.

Also consider: Self-hosted Solutions

Self-hosted uptime monitoring is significantly more complicated to setup than a hosted solution. You have to install the software and then configure it. You will also need an off-server location to host the monitoring software. For people with only one web host and a few web sites, a self-hosted solution might be too much to get start with.

If you are in the mood to install software and have the necessary infrastructure, there are several possible options. A lot of web hosts use Nagios to monitor their servers and others use Zabbix. Of the two, Zabbix seems a bit more user friendly and easy to use. Both are extremely powerful and feature rich, though. In terms of self-hosted software, you might also be interested in NetStatus Monitor or Rushland.net’s Server Status.

All of the above mentioned software is free to download and use.

Bottomline

Uptime is important to all web sites and should be a big factor in considering which host to use (and stay with). Many hosts regularly guarantee 99.5% - 99.9% uptime and back it by money back guarantees. If your host doesn’t, consider switching.

From my experience, the major uptime monitoring companies all offer about the same features and services. The pricing varies slightly, but among the major companies, you get essentially the same results and the same product.

Before picking a company, define your budget for uptime monitoring. For about $10 a month, you can get all the features you’ll ever need. From there, sign up for the free trials at the various companies. Compare the little things like which interface you like more and which company seems easiest to deal with. Pay attention to the reports they send you and compare which company’s data seems most accurate. After the 30 days, you should have a clear picture of which company and service is best for you.