It is essential for webmasters and system administrators to monitor their websites and networks to be able to react as soon as possible if all or part of it goes down. That’s especially true for professionals who earn their living with their websites. A possibility are commercial services that notify the webmaster as soon as a website becomes unreachable. Ghacks is monitored round the clock by Livewatch which will automatically send an SMS or email when a server or website goes down.
Not everyone wants to pay to monitor websites though. The free portable software program SiteMonitor provides a local solution for the Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 and can be configured to monitor selected websites and notify the user if they become unreachable. It is a good alternative as long as it is run on a computer system that is online 24/7.
New urls can be added easily to SiteMonitor. All that it takes is to add a descriptive name, an url and HTML to match which is simply content that should appear on the website. The website monitoring software will check every 30 minutes by default; To much for important websites. The interval can be changed in the options. The options are also the place where the notification preferences can be edited. The website monitor provides two different types of reactions to website connection problems:
- Run a script or executable, e.g. a script that will restart a server or service
- Send email to notify a user about the connection problem
The amount of failures before either one of the reactions will be initiated can be configured in the same menu as well.
Below is the small php script that we use to check if the database is up and running on Ghacks:
<?php
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'username';
$dbpass = 'password';
$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error');
$dbname = 'databasename';
mysql_select_db($dbname);
if ($conn) {echo "ok";}
else {echo "error";}
?>
replace username with the database username, password with the password of the username and databasename with the name of the database. Save it as database.php, upload it to your website and load the new file. It should display ok if the database is up and error if it is down. The url that points to the script can then be added to the website monitoring software to check if it returns ok. If it does the website is up, if it does not it is down.
Alternatives are the Website Monitor and Downloader Wysigot, Montastic or the Server Monitor Observu.
Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter.Related Articles:
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Thanks for this information!
Very helpful for me :-)
Just to add another to the realm, I recently heard about AlertFox. What makes them interesting is their powerful transaction monitoring support. I currently run a 30-day trial with them and plan to switch over if it works out well.
Found this directory the other day. It has plenty of website monitoring tools. Here’s the link: http://www.activitymonitoringsoftware.com/website_monitoring/website_monitoring1.php
Thanks for the useful and informative post.
I have been disappointed by no charge website monitoring program.