As for me, when I go to a website and type in the website address; I look for functionality, speed, and availability. If you have a website that is geared for business, you want to make sure your site is stable and maintain an image of professionalism. This can be especially true if you attend different networking events and have the opportunity to distribute your business cards to potential prospects. When those prospects decide to view your website, it appears that your website is not available to view. In this case, you might want to consider using a tool that monitors your website for up and response time.
There are hundreds of services that provide website monitoring, but in this case, I will list a few that I have tried and use.
Internet Seer. Internet Seer checks your website remotely from several geographically monitoring stations at certain times. Internet Seer provides other types of monitoring which includes availability monitoring, performance monitoring, link and image checking. If you want to take advantage of the other services they provide, there is a monthly fee for checking your websites at certain time periods. The service that I signed up for was the Standard which is free and provides a limited usage (allowing you to monitor one website URL) which is one of the limitations of the free website monitoring. The free one works out for me because I just want to know when my site is down and send me an email to let me know.
URL: www.internetseer.com
Host-Tracker. Host Tracker has a very simple website interface. This site allows you to check your website up and response time without signing up first. I decided to sign up for this one anyway and work with the free one. With the free account, you are able to include two website URL’s to check your website and of course reports are sent out on a weekly, quarterly, or yearly basis. If you use the free account, it will check for you on an hourly basis the uptime. I found the navigation of this site to be puzzling. I was not sure where to find my statistics until I looked under “Main Page”. The main page indicates the uptime stats, sites for monitoring, contacts, alerts and reporting.
URL: www.host-tracker.com
Mon.itor.us. I use this one the most. I like the fact that is free without paying for any more features like that of Host-Tracker and Internet Seer. This one allows you to select what you want to monitor from your website. I like the fact that it offers the following:
- Monitor your site externally 24×7 which reports your site being down and checking for response time.
- Monitor your site internally which checks your memory, hard disk, and the Intranet.
- Monitor visitor tracking. This allows you to track your website visitors, page views and much more. I check my visitors tracking through my web hosting service to see how many unique visitors come to my site.
- Provides a chart of your website response time.
URL: www.mon.itor.us
In conclusion, using and choosing a website monitoring tool can be useful especially when you want to make sure your site is available to your clients as it relates to speed, availability, uptime, and response time.
