9 Website Monitoring Services: Up-time, Downtime & Performance

Considering website monitoring to ensure that your website is performing as you would like? Awesome! You’ve come to the right place.

You can use website monitoring to check out your websites uptime, speed and functions. Website monitoring tools are invaluable for website owners or webmasters who want to know the facts about how well their website is performing. They’ll help you to see where your site might be falling short so that you can improve the overall functionality of your website and the experience of end users.

Not all website monitoring services are made equally. Some offer FREE services, some have a comprehensive list of features and a dashboard for you to overview performance, some check your website every minute, while others check every 30 minutes. There is also the method that they contact you, some offer SMS credits so that you can be alerted directly to your mobile if anything goes wrong, while others rely on good old-fashioned email to send alerts. 

Getting to the root of what is going wrong with your website has never been easier. Website monitors will even alert you, normally within minutes, if your site goes down. Meaning you won’t need to keep checking or worse still, lose sales if your website goes offline. 

What is a Monitor? (In relation to website monitoring services)

When you’re searching for a “website monitoring service” you’ll come into some jargon. For instance the extensive use of the word “monitor”. The term monitor, in this instance refers to a website, web app, and server or FTP server. Some website monitoring service use the term “checks” or tracking but they mean the same thing.

There are both basic monitors and more advanced monitors. The easiest way to think about it is that a monitor is like a website. The amount of monitors you can use equates to the amount of websites you can track.

In this article we’ll share some neat website monitoring tools that you can use straight away on your site. Best of all, you can access some of these tools completely FREE of charge!

#1 | Uptime Robot (FREE)

Uptime Robot has over 600,000+ customers worldwide and offers a completely FREE service. Uptime Robot is one of the largest and best website monitors out there. With the free plan you can monitor up to 50 websites for free. They check your site every 5 minutes and alert you if anything has gone awry. You also get 2 months of logs so that you can check the report and see how your site has been performing. They provide a nice UX that allows you to monitor your website via a pleasing dashboard. 

Launched back in 2010, Uptime Robot was created as a FREE tool – then in 2015 they created their Pro plan that currently costs £38 per month, which allows the monitoring of 1000 websites. Their paid option is also 5x faster, they check your website every 1 minute with the paid option and also send out an SMS alert – which is really handy when you are out and about. The paid option also allows you to access to additional server locations. Because your website may appear differently in other parts of the world. 

Click Here To Visit Uptime Robot

Pros

• 100% FREE option
• Monitor 50 websites for FREE
• 2 Month log with the free plan
• Paid plan allows you to monitor a decent 1000 websites
• Cost effective paid offering

Cons

• Free plan monitors every 5 minutes, you need to upgrade to get 1-minute monitors

#2| Freshping

Freshping (previously known as Insping) offers a really great deal that is forever FREE. They give you 50 monitors, 1-minute interval tracking in 10 global locations – All that completely free of charge! I like Freshping’s business model, where they only want you to pay as your business grows. 

They also offer a 21-day free trial on their premium plans. When you upgrade you get to give it a test drive for free without inputting your credit card, which is a nice touch. They offer 60 checks (monitors) for their cheapest package called “Blossom”. 

Click Here To Visit Freshping

Pros

• Up to 10 users can use the free account
• 1 min interval (Even oon free)
• Reporting & graphs
• Flexibility to add more monitors as you grow
• Easy to use

Cons

• You need to pay annually

#3 | Montastic.com (FREE)

The free option is quite basic but it does the job of alerting you to any downtime. They don’t have a dashboard, like the other providers, instead Monastic just sends out alerts. You get to monitor just 3 sites with the free option and they’ll be checked every 30 minutes. Personally I feel that is a bit long – as you can get FREE monitoring every 5 minutes with Uptime robot and Freshping monitor your site at 1-minute intervals on their forever free plan.

They offer a nice keyword feature that might help you with SEO. A very simple service with no bells or whistles, but it does the job of alerting you when your site is down and checking keywords. If you upgrade you’ll get a faster 5-minute interval monitoring service and up to 500 monitors for £40, or less if you want. A great service for someone who isn’t interested in anything but getting alerts to know when their site goes down. They also let you know when your site goes back up again.  

Click Here To Visit Montastic

#4 | Monitis (15-Day FREE Trial)

Monitis (previously Monitor.us) is a website monitoring service owned by the company TeamViewer. They offer a nice fully functional 15-day trial without supplying your credit card. Monitis has some great features, for instance – you can get instant alerts via email, SMS, twitter or phone the minute they find something wrong. Plus, you can sign up and access everything within 3 minutes. 

The plan that you select is entirely customizable and cloud-based – so there is no need to download anything to get started. Montis is user friendly and straight forward, I just wish they had a 100% free option.

You can monitor website uptime to track up-time, response time, and performance from multiple international locations. The predictive features that Monitis offer are really great, you can easily detect bottlenecks before they arise. Everything is completely customizable and in one easy to use dashboard.

Click Here To Visit Monitis

#5 | Site24x7.com

Site24x7 offers a full suite of website monitoring tools, including real user feedback. They don’t offer a completely free package, but you can easily start a 30 day free trial and test drive their website monitoring features. Their website and tools are available in wide variety of languages such as Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.

With their starter package you can monitor 10 websites for £7.15 and get up to 50 SMS credits so that you can be notified the minute there is anything wrong with your site. What’s great is that you can monitor your site from over 90+ locations and they also offer logs and multi-user accounts, even with their lowest price package. For larger companies, Site24x7 offers an Enterprise bundle, but you need to get in touch with them to sort out your individual requirements. 

Click Here To Visit Site24x7

#6 | Pingdom.com

With Pingdom.com you can monitor 10 sites at 1-minute intervals for £10.30. They also have some professional services that would be suitable for a larger organisation. Multiple users can use the account, which is great for larger co-corporations. You get the feeling that Pingdom means business – they are designed for the more serious business user. 

With Pingdom.com you don’t get a free-trial or access to a free account, which is a bit of a bummer. But you can sign up for a free demo to check it out.  They have servers all over the world, from which they can monitor your websites uptime and performance. One great thing about Pingdom is that they offer real user feedback (rather than just feedback from bots) and they work to help you assess any flaws or issues on your website.

Click Here To Visit Pingdom

#7 | StatusCake (FREE)

StatusCake offer a completely FREE service, where you get 10 monitors and limited features. You get email alerts, but if you want SMS alerts then you’ll need to upgrade to one of their paid options. What is really good about StatusCake is that they offer a free trial on both of their premium packages. 

You can upgrade for £12 and for that you’ll get 100 monitors and access to a wide range of premium features like SSL monitoring, server monitoring, virus scanning and reporting. To access their full range of services – which includes multi-user login and white label services, you’ll need a business account. 

Click Here To Visit Statuscake

#8 | Uptrends.com 

Uptrends offer a customizable package where you can add and remove features. You can add on monitors, decrease monitoring intervals, access advanced dashboards and even view transactions on your service. Their basic plan gets you 10 monitors and 60 SMS credits for £12. 

When a website monitoring provider offers SMS notifications, I feel that they are quite professional. That way you can find out quickly if there is an issue with your site. Uptrends also offer phone support and advanced dashboards.

Click Here To Visit Uptrends

#9 | Host-Tracker.com (30 Day Free Trial)

HostTracker is a feature rich website monitoring service. You can monitor all aspects of your site for instance find out if your site (or IP) has been blacklisted and be alerted when your SSL certificate is going to expire. You can use HostTracker for server tracking or more straight forward site tracking.  They have servers in 60 global locations for you to check your site from. 

HostTrakcer offer a 30 day free trial and also a completely FREE service, they also send out SMS alerts. For £4 per month you can monitor 5 sites with a 10-minute interval. They offer just about every tracking tool you could imagine, so they are great for the more advanced user who wants to check every aspect of their sites performance, including database performance, content checking, error diagnostics and much more. 

Click Here To Visit Host-Tracker

All in All

As you can see no two website monitoring services are the same. They all vary on the features, pricing, monitors and tracking intervals. So what website monitoring service is best for you? Why not get started with our favourite and completely free service Uptime Robot. If you like the sound of any of the other providers, take advantage of the free trial and find out what service is best for your needs.