Websites go down all the time. Sometimes it’s a minor inconvenience to your users, sometimes it’s a complete disaster. Either way, it’s important that you know when your website goes down and when it comes back up again. In this post, I’ll share 7 of my favorite free website monitoring tools you can use to monitor your own website or the websites of clients.
Are you serious about your website’s performance, uptime, responsiveness and speed? Do you want to do more of you own maintenance of sites or are you thinking about doing some basic troubleshooting yourself? Well, if the answer is yes, then you need to learn more about website monitoring tools free. But more importantly what website monitoring tools 2021 has in store.
UptimeRobot Review – The Best Free Website Monitoring Service
UptimeRobot offers a free plan if you aren’t yet ready to spend money on a monitoring service. This option is excellent for a blog or simple website. If you need more advanced features, the price of a pro subscription is very reasonable.
It takes about a minute to get set up, and now you’ll be able to keep tabs on your website 24/7 without having to go check it yourself. Let UptimeRobot do it.
You get all the necessary monitoring features with the free plan, including HTTP(S) monitoring, ping monitoring, port monitoring, and response time monitoring. You also get 50 monitors with five-minute checks.
Additionally, the free plan offers two months of log retention and one status page.
You can upgrade to the Pro plan for $15 per month to get more advanced features in addition to the ones you get with the free plan. Some of the additional functions include:
- Voice calls and SMS alerts
- 24-month log retention
- One-minute checks
- Cron job monitoring
- Keyword monitoring
- Maintenance windows
- SSL certificate expiry monitoring
- Advanced notification settings
- Unlimited status pages
There is also an Enterprise plan for custom check intervals and several monitors.
UptimeRobot offers reliable website monitoring tools and will easily scale with your business as it grows. The service has monitoring locations in the USA, UK, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Canada, and Japan.
Register for a free UptimeRobot account. Use it as long as you like.
Pingdom Review – The Best for Small And Medium Businesses
Pingdom by SolarWinds is a powerful website monitoring service for small to medium-sized businesses. The service is also suitable for startups, digital marketers, and even DevOps.
The service gives you a choice of synthetic or real user monitoring to provide you with a comprehensive view of what’s going on with your website. You can also combine the capabilities of both monitoring options with their Enterprise plan.
Pingdom’s synthetic monitoring checks for uptime from over 100 locations, provides page speed analysis, and monitors important transactions, including shopping cart, checkout, user login, new user registration, and search, among others.
RUM monitoring with Pingdom gives you detailed insights into how real users experience your website across different browsers, devices, and geographic locations.
The service also monitors your mobile site every 60 seconds (same for desktop) and performs the same checks on your mobile sites to help you deliver a standard experience across devices.
Pingdom also has a powerful HTTP-based, RESTful API for people who like to customize and automate synthetic monitoring interactions. Developers can also write their own applications or scripts depending on their specific needs.
Pingdom integrates with plenty of third-party services, including Webhooks, Slack, and VictorOps, to further optimize reporting, incident management, alerts, and dashboard.
Additional features include:
- Sharable reports
- Color-coded chart bars
- Web analytics tool
- Bounce rate checker
- SSL certificate monitoring and alerting
- Cloud performance monitoring
- Joomla monitoring
- Server uptime monitoring
- Website uptime history
You can try out Pingdom’s 14-day free trial for access to all the features. Paid plans start at $10 per month, which is very affordable for smaller businesses.
Alertra
The first stop for website monitoring
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Cost-effective+Check multiple services+Global testing
When it comes to website monitoring, probably your first stop should be Alertra, especially because it allows you to do a free spot check of access to your website from server locations around the world.
This means if you try – and fail – to access your website, you can use Alertra to quickly diagnose whether the website server really is offline, or whether it’s a potential network/connection issue with your broadband.
In general, though, Alertra is a simple but useful monitoring solution to ensure basic your website functions are up and running, such as HTTP, SMTP, POP3, DNS, and MySQL. This can be especially important when other services might see that your server is still up and running through a HTTPS request, but not notice that MySQL has crashed, for example, which can be especially important when most websites are database driven.
While Alertra is good for general spot checks, a subscription is worth considering as it’s a very cost-effective service. There’s also no contract, so you can start/stop the service whenever you feel like.
Site24x7
Best for multiple websites
REASONS TO BUY
+Good value for money+Price per server or website+Add-ons come in handy
In its simplest form, Site24x7 is a powerful website monitoring solution that scales all the way to become an all-encompassing, full-blown powerhouse that can do application performance monitoring and infrastructure monitoring for thousands of servers and websites simultaneously. That’s great for DevOps teams who want to monitor and troubleshoot applications, servers and network infrastructure, including private and public clouds.
The cheapest tier gives you the ability to monitor 10 websites or servers with one synthetic web transaction with the (rare) ability to buy more add-ons if needed – that might come in handy as the lowest RUM (real user monitoring) pageview count stands at only 100K.
All tiers have a 30-day free trial period. Site24x7 distinguishes between basic monitors and advanced monitors: web page speed and website defacement for example count as advanced monitors, while a pure HTTP request is deemed basic.
The website monitoring service also provides far more free tools than its competitors. However, the sheer breadth and depth of Site24x7’s offerings runs the danger of confusing novice users who only want to check their sites for availability.
StatusCake — Fastest URL Testing Intervals
More than 100,000 users trust StatusCake for website monitoring including Microsoft, Netflix, FanDuel, and JetBrains.
StatusCake has over 200 monitoring servers across 43 different countries. They actually have a monitoring server on all but one continent.
The reason why this tool ranks so high on my list is because it has one of the fastest testing intervals on the market today. So far, we’ve seen tools check the status of a website every minute or every five minutes. But StatusCake has an option for 30-second intervals.
In order to get the fastest monitoring intervals, you’ll need to sign up for the Business plan, starting at $66.66 per month.
StatusCake also has a Superior plan, starting at $20.41 per month. For that rate, the testing interval jumps back up to one minute.
For those of you who want a website monitoring service with advanced features, StatusCake is a great place to start. Depending on the plan you choose, you’ll benefit from things like:
- Page speed tests
- SSL monitoring
- Domain monitoring
- Virus scanning
- Alerts and reports
Another top feature of the Business plan is access to team tools like multi-user login and audit logs.
Like some of the other top website monitoring services out there, StatusCake offers a free plan with basic features. If you sign up for free, your site will be tested in five-minute intervals and you’ll have access to root cause analysis for any downtimes.
The free plan also comes with page speed tests every 24 hours. But beyond that, you’ll need to upgrade if you want any of the advanced features.
Conclusion:
Website monitoring tools are a must for keeping your website safe and secure. But not all website monitoring software is created equal. And with so many website monitoring tools on the market, it can be confusing to choose the right one.