If your site goes down at 1:00 in the morning, will you find out about it? If so, when?

Though large corporations routinely have infrastructure that alert administrators to outages, smaller webmasters may not get any alerts at all. Even managed web hosts don’t always actively monitor connections, waiting instead for customers to report outages before acting.

As such, it can be many hours before a Webmaster detects an outage, especially if they are asleep, on vacation or otherwise away from their computer.

Fortunately, monitoring services promise to be your 24/7 watchdog against outages, alerting you via email, text message or IM when your site goes down.

But how do they stack up in terms of price or features? Here we take a look at five services and how they measure up.

Host-tracker.com

Host-tracker.com‘s free monitoring account is fairly basic but both the Light and the Pro account come with free SMS credits per month, rather than selling them in packs or by the message as other monitoring services do. Host-tracker.com can also pass along information to a CGI script, making it useful, for example, to check a shopping cart check out procedure.

They also have two larger accounts, Pro 50 and Premium, that track 50 and 200 URLs respectively.

Accounts	Free	Light	Pro
Cost/Month	$0	$5	$30
Monitored Connections	2	5	20
Monitoring Interval (Max, Minutes)	30	5	1
Monitoring Locations	49	49	49
Alerts	Email/SMS	Email/SMS	Email/SMS

Mon.itor.us/Monitis

Mon.itor.us and Monitis, though technically two different sites, are actually the free and pro accounts to one another. Mon.itor.us is the free version. Monitis the paid version. Mon.itor.us is possibly the most robust free account on the list, offering 10 different protocol and a decent check interval.

Perhaps most interesting is that both versions offer internal server montoring, allowing you to watch the health of your server before it goes down.

Accounts	Mon.itor.us	Monitis Basic	Monitis Plus
Cost/Month	$0	$10	$40
Monitored Connections	N/A	5	30
Monitoring Interval (Max, Minutes)	30	5	5
Monitoring Locations	3	5	5
Alerts	Email/IM/SMS	Email/IM/SMS	Email/IM/SMS

Pingdom

Accounts Basic Business Cost/Month $10 $40 Monitored Connections 5 30 Monitoring Interval (Max, Minutes) 1 1 Monitoring Locations 4* 4* Alerts Email/SMS Email/SMS

*The do not say how many locations they provide but show four in a screenshot.

Site 24×7

Site 24×7 has a very different pricing scheme than most monitoring companies. Rather than paying for a package, you pay a certain amount per site you wish to monitor based on how frequently you want to monitor it. For example, on the “Standard” plan, it costs $3 per month, per URL to have Site 24×7 check a domain every 10 minutes and $4 for every 5 minutes.

Site 24×7 also offers the ability to check web applications, mail server and FTP monitoring and, as a bonus, can also check the content of your site to make sure that it has not been altered.

Accounts	Free	Standard	Premium
Cost/Month	$0	N/A	N/A
Monitored Connections	2	N/A	N/A
Monitoring Interval (Max, Minutes)	60	N/A	N/A
Monitoring Locations	1	1	Up to 15
Alerts	Email/SMS/RSS	Email/SMS/RSS	Email/SMS/RSS

SiteUptime

SiteUptime‘s free account is very limited in terms of alert methods and even its basic paid account does not come with SMS alerts. The premium account also comes with a very limited number of monitors and though the interval of 5 minutes is reasonable, other sites offer much shorter intervals for the same price.

On the plus side, SiteUptime does provide monitoring of FTP and SSL connections, making it a more robust solution.

Accounts	Free	Premium	Advanced
Cost/Month	$0	$5	$10
Monitored Connections	1	3	6
Monitoring Interval (Max, Minutes)	30	5	5
Monitoring Locations	4	4	4
Alerts	Email	Email	Email/SMS

Bottom Line

If you’re looking for a free account, Mon.itor.us is probably the best two choices on this list. They have the best search interval and the largest number of alert methods available. However, even their free account is very limited.

For paid accounts, every site has their pluses and minuses. Host-tracker.com has the most monitoring locations, Site 24×7 has the most flexible system for setting up your account and great prices, but only one monitoring location for its entry-level paid account. However, it is Pingdom that seems to provide the best overall value of money spent versus monitoring interval.

In the end, any of these companies will probably work well for your site monitoring needs. Find a service that fits your need and your budget and you should be fine.

The important thing though is that, if your host isn’t actively checking your server, you need to monitor it yourself so that you can be alerted to downtimes and respond well.

In our next post we’ll look at tips and tricks to ensure that your server is well monitored and save you money in the process.

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Tags:   downtime • outages • uptime