What happens to your website while you are not looking? Unless you are on your site several times a day, you may not ever realize that your site has encountered an error. If your site is down...you lose potential customers or productivity. If you spend a lot of time, energy and money marketing your site, then you want to make sure that you are getting 100% uptime to compliment your internet marketing efforts.
Hire A Website Watch Dog!
There are several reasons to deploy a website monitoring service for your website, below are a few of the main reasons:
Weekly Availability Statistics - One of the best reasons to use a website monitoring service is the ability to review your website statistics for the week. Most website monitoring services will send a weekly report of your website uptime statistics to your e-mail address every week. By receiving weekly reports, you can tell for the week whether or not your site has encountered an error or outage. This report will also tell you which day and the total length of time your site was unavailable.
Outage and Recovery E-mail Notification - Most website monitoring services will check your site every 30 minutes and every 60 minutes. If the monitoring service detects an outage during that time frame, an e-mail will be sent to you to advise of an outage. The website monitoring service, will then check your site within the next 30 minute interval and if your site restores within that time, you will also receive an e-mail stating recovery time and the total time of the outage. It is important that when you receive an outage e-mail to visit your website to determine if the outage or error was temporary. If your site is completely unreachable, then you should contact your website host to notify them of the issue.
Free Website Monitoring - Several website monitoring services are free to use for the basic plan. The basic plan (Free) is usually set up to check your site every 30 and 60 minutes. If you have a website that gets a lot of traffic or you have a site that is used by your employees you may want to purchase website monitoring based on the size of your business needs.
Website Monitoring Services
Freewebmonitoring.com - Free Web Monitoring provides a completely FREE website monitoring service, where as others have free site monitoring, but have other packages that you can pay for more services. Free Web Monitoring monitors your web site's availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with instant email alerts and weekly web site performance statistics. The features of their service include: Website testing every 60 minutes, Weekly Statistics Report and E-mail alerts for site outage and recovery. Another good feature of Freewebmonitoring is that you can monitor more than one url or website per account.
Siteuptime.com - SiteUptime is a website monitoring service that checks your website at regular intervals and notifies you via email or SMS if it becomes unavailable. Siteuptime differs from Freewebmonitoring in the sense that it checks your site every 30 and 60 minutes as opposed to one check every 60 minutes. However, the downside of Siteuptime is that you can only monitor one website under the free account. Siteuptime free standard features are: E-mail Alerts, Monthly Reports and Online Statistics.
InternetSupervision.com - Internet Supervision is another good web site monitoring service that provides a free account as well as several other paid packages. The major difference between Internet Supervison and the other mentioned providers is that for the free account your site will be tested every 15 minutes for the first 90 days and then after 90 days your site is checked every 24 hours. The downside to the free account is that your site could go up and down several times in 24 hours. Another key point for using Internet Supervision's free account is that you have to link back to their site with their code in order to enable monitoring.
Special Consideration...it is in your best interest when you create your free account to add at least two different e-mail accounts in the event that your e-mail service goes down when your site does. This will ensure that if your e-mail service is attached to the outage of your website, you will still get an e-mail on your secondary e-mail account advising of the outage. | 
