Website Monitor

The biggest fear of webmasters - besides being hacked - is the fear that the website becomes unavailable and that all visitors will see the dreaded “Cannot connect” message in the browser. This is extremely harmful especially when you are a full time webmaster whose life (literally) depends on those websites.

No one can manually check his websites 24 hours 7 days a week which means that some service is needed that monitors the websites automatically. In addition programs that are run on a local computer can be used to check the websites periodically to make sure they are still up and running. That’s the only convenient way to check if you own more than a few websites.

The tool hpObserver is one of those programs that can monitor the status of a website. You can configure it to run in intervals of 1, 5 and 10 minutes or manually. Four methods are available that check the website, they are: ICPM (ping), TCP / IP, Imitate Browser, XML HTTP.

The method defines largely which data can be collected from the website. An ICPM cannot for instance return the size of the website while the Imitate Browser method can.

The application has some shortcomings though. The feature it is lacking the most is in my opinion a way to notify the user if he is not near his computer. At the moment the application is only useful if run constantly and if a user is present to take a look at the results regularly.

Another thing that I really missed was a help file or documentation. There is none whatsoever and it is kinda hard to figure out what the settings and different methods do and how you can take advantage of them in the best way. Lastly you can only select one method which will be used to check all websites. It is not possible to configure individual settings for each website.