The website’s availability is a critical part of a business; we can’t stare at the monitor all the time. Setting up a command center and monitoring team is feasible for a large organization to monitor their web applications’ uptime but not for small-medium businesses, non-profit organizations, or personal bloggers. Your website can go down for various reasons, including a database down or a hack. Another common reason for a website to go down can be a hosting provider, and that’s why you should always host your site with a reliable hosting provider. Any website owner or administrator needs to ensure proper alerting is in place so you get notified when the website is not available. I’ve listed the following tools, which will help you get notified in case your web URL goes down. Most of them offer a FREE plan, so pick the one you like. However, if you are looking for an in-house solution, then you can try a PHP Server Monitor open source.
Uptrends
Uptrends monitor your site from multiple locations and notify you through email when it is broken. It got a beautiful dashboard where you can see various essential metrics of your site.
Availability chart Error breakdown by types Total time taken to load the graph
You can customize the dashboard the way you want, and it gives you the option to export the data in PDF or excel. The great thing is you can get it started for FREE.
Dotcom-Monitor
Dotcom-Monitor makes it easy to ensure the performance, functionality, and uptime of websites, web applications, servers, APIs & more! With a full suite of enterprise-grade tools and 25+ global monitoring locations, Dotcom-Monitor helps you quickly identify where performance issues originate. Get notified fast via text, email, or telephone alerts with monitoring as frequently as 1 minute! Try it free for 30 days!
StatusCake
StatusCake has been around since 2012 and is a fantastic app for monitoring not only your website’s availability but also its performance. Its users include both small businesses, who make use of the feature-rich free plan, as well as large-scale businesses that enjoy advanced features and test limits. Free trials are available on all paid plans with no credit card or commitment required. The following are some of its features.
Uptime monitoring – HTTP, TCP, SSH, DNS, SMTP, PING & PUSH Instant & Reliable Alerts – Email, SMS & third party apps such as Slack, Telegram, & Discord Root Cause Analysis Page Speed Monitoring SSL Monitoring Domain Monitoring Server Monitoring Virus Scanning
Sematext
Sematext Synthetics features powerful monitors that help track website and API availability from the designated checkpoints around the world to minimize downtime and MTTR. Checks can be customized to run anywhere from one minute to once every hour. Sematext will detect any changes in performance, track core web vitals, network timings, and the performance of third-party APIs, monitor SSL certificates, and more in order to provide end-to-end visibility. If anything goes wrong, you are immediately notified through a number of channels, including Email, Slack, VictorOps, Twilio, custom notifications hooks, and others. You can also create public or private Status Pages with availability and performance information for any monitored services and the ability to publish information about incidents or scheduled maintenance. These Status Pages can live on a custom domain and have your visual elements. Sematext Synthetics comes with a free trial, and plans start from $29/month and offer 40 HTTP and five browser monitors with data retention of 30 days. Besides the regular plan, you can also choose a Pay-as-you-go plan that allows you to get individual monitors for as low as $2/month.
HetrixTools
HetrixTools allows you to monitor your websites and servers, every minute, from around the globe. You’ll be able to minimize your downtime by being the first to know about it. You can configure notifications via Email, SMS, Telegram, PushBullet, Pushover, Twitter, Slack, Discord, Mattermost, RocketChat, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, and Webhooks.
AlertBot
AlertBot is among the top players in the website monitoring industry and is ideal for the midsize to enterprise organizations. They use real web browsers to do all their performance testing and help identify problem areas and bottlenecks on your site to improve the users’ experience. AlertBot excels at offering advanced features that are very easy and intuitive to use, personally assisting customers with web transaction monitoring setup, and providing detailed email reports that clearly pinpoint website problems so you can take action quickly.
Cronitor
Cronitor is a modern uptime monitoring service with advanced features and a clean, approachable design that anybody can use. With 12 global monitoring locations and checks that run as frequently as every 30 seconds, you can trust you’ll be alerted quickly when your website or API is down. Create a simple uptime monitor in minutes or create powerful tests with advanced features including:
Custom request headers, cookies, and more. Page content assertions. Real browser testing for JavaScript apps. Global monitoring with custom test locations. Instant alerts through Email, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and more.
Checkly
Checkly is an active monitoring platform for developers using modern stack. You can use JavaScript to monitor the uptime as well as the performance and correctness of your website and APIs. It seamlessly combines ease of use and fast set up with programmable features. No wonder they name modern tech companies such as Vercel, Humio, or 1Password as their customers. To monitor the uptime of your frontend, Checkly runs JavaScript and open-source powered browser checks. For API monitoring, you can configure fully-fledged HTTP requests with flexible assertions and Node.js-based setup/teardown scripts. Checkly is built with developers in mind. Everything is customizable, well documented, and the powerful REST API lets you orchestrate and automate your checks, for example, with Terraform. Checks can be triggered from GitHub or run on schedule with down to 1-minute intervals across global data centers. When things break, you get notifications via your favorite alerting channel like Pagerduty, Opsgenie, or Slack. Checkly offers a free developer plan and a transparent execution-based model for larger projects. All-in-all a great solution to monitor the uptime of your APIs and websites.
Hyperping
Hyperping is a handy service that combines uptime monitoring, status page monitoring & incident management all in one tool, with a sleek UI. Supports alerts via SMS, Slack, or email for example. You get alerted seconds after your monitor goes down. Get set up and ready to go in a couple of minutes. Features
Supports HTTP(s), ping, and port checks on a minute basis Monitoring from 14 different regions, going from the Americas, Europe, Asia to Australia. SSL monitoring: get notifications before your SSL certificates (HTTPS) expire Integrations: SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie Built-in status page to keep your users in the loop Easily add teammates to share alerts
Hyperping is trusted by thousands of online businesses. Try their trial to experience the platform.
Uptime Robot
Uptime Robot allows you to monitor up to 50 sites with an interval of 5 minutes check, in FREE. You may also perform a basic level of defacement monitoring by monitoring keywords on a page to alert if it exists or not exist. Uptime Robot also helps you to monitor the port that means you can get notified when service like FTP, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP or custom port goes down.
Uptime
Uptime, enterprise-ready site availability and performance monitoring with tons of features. Uptime provides detailed response time reporting from more than 30 locations worldwide. Don’t just stop at uptime but also perform essential security checks and get notified immediately. There are multiple ways to receive alerts.
Email SMS Push notification Webhooks Twitter Pushover and more.
Uptime is also capable of monitoring SSH, DNS, Ping, POP, IMAP, etc.
UPTIMIA
Uptimia offers website uptime checks in 5 minutes intervals from 5 data centers and notifies you through email under the free account. I like their reporting on a beautiful graph. It also shows average response time with each technical check like DNS, Connects, Send, Wait, and Receive.
Freshping
Previously known as Insping. Freshping by Freshworks let you monitor 50 URL from 10 locations worldwide with one minute of internal in FREE. Freshping is an all-in-one site availability monitoring solution with the following features.
Multi-channel notification Status page to announce real-time incident status to your users and customers Multi-user login Integrate with other services like Slack, Twilio, Freshdesk, Zaiper, etc. to get notified
Under the FREE plan, monitoring data is available for six months.
WebGazer
Offering an API and want to monitor that too? With WebGazer, you can do that. With all the standard site monitoring features, you also get a beautiful status page. And not just the website but you can monitor cron job, IoT devices, and scheduled tasks too to get instant downtime notification.
Pingdom
This list wouldn’t complete without Pingdom. Unfortunately, there is no FREE Plan available now.
Better Uptime
Better Uptime is a modern monitoring service that combines uptime monitoring, incident management, and status pages into a single beautifully designed product. The setup takes 3 minutes and after that, you get a call whenever your website goes down. The main features are:
Unlimited phone call alerts HTTP(s), Ping, SSL & TLD expiration, Cron jobs checks Easy on-call scheduling Screenshots & error logs of incidents Slack, Teams, Heroku, AWS, and 100+ other integrations
Conclusion I hope the above tools help you to monitor your website so you can be notified when it goes down. And, if you are looking for all-in-one services like performance acceleration, cloud WAF, malware scanner, site monitoring, then try SUCURI.
