Since I no longer manage servers directly, I have removed the GSM phone attached to my office server, sending me text alerts whenever a server or service is down.

I do wish to keep an eye on client websites of course though, as well as this one (which has had some small downtime issues in the past month due to some capacity issues with it’s host).

There are a plethora of website monitoring services out there, but the one I decided to take for a test drive was Site24x7.com. It offers the usual monitoring of a website and sends email and text alerts when a site is down. Best of all, it is free!

I had my concerns about the quality of the service given it is free – it is the kind of thing I would happily pay 10-15 euro a month for. I have checked the logs a few times and there are plenty of visits from the monitoring bot and it has reported downtimes on the sites it is monitoring within a minute or two. All in all, it seems a quality service.

One element which I am just about to take a look at in more detail is it’s ability to monitor transactions. This would allow you to not only ensure a site is up, but that it is functioning correctly by say, performing a search or adding something to the website’s shopping cart.

In doing so, you can ensure that the database server is running ok too, or nobody has made a change to your code that has broken the site!