Many webmasters and system administrators need to know immediately when they websites or servers go down. Downtime can mean that business is lost, that search engines record errors when trying to crawl a website and that first time visitors never come back because the website or service is not loading or displaying error messages.
Big companies usually have IT staff that is monitoring the server infrastructure 24/7, something that most website and server owners cannot (and do not have the desire to) afford. Some webhosting companies provide 24/7 monitoring of their dedicated servers, virtual servers and web hosting packages but the effectiveness varies a lot and the account owner is usually not informed at once if something goes down (and back up again).
A third alternative are so called web monitoring services. These services are web based and offer a set of tools to monitor web servers and websites. Most of these services offer email, sms and even phone notifications as soon as the server goes down.
Pingdom is one of those services. The web monitoring service offers various http, network and email checks that can be configured easily. The number of services that are monitored depends on the user’s account level. Pingdom offers a free account that is good for monitoring one web service on one domain. The basic and business accounts raise those limits to 5 respectively 30 checks with the option to buy extra checks if needed.
Website Monitoring Setup
Pingdom does not require any installations or configurations on the web server or website that the user wants to monitor. All monitoring services are setup on the Pingdom website.
It starts by selecting one of the available check types.
This ranges from http checks over network checks that test the DNS, TCP port or UDP to email checks that can check Pop3, SMTP and IMAP connections. The check resolution, that is the interval in which the check is performed can be selected in this step as well. The interval ranges from every minute to every 60 minutes.
The next options differ depending on the choice in the first step. A http check for instance requires only the url of the website that should be checked. Entering the url completes this step which does provide optional settings which can help a user in performing specific tasks.
The Check For String On Page parameter for instance can easily be used to check if a database is up and running. To do that the webmaster needs to write (or copy and paste) a small script that displays certain text on a custom url if the website is up or down. This can for instance be UP if it is up and DOWN if it is down. The string check can be configured to report downtime if the DOWN string appeared on the page of the website or server.
Other optional settings in this step include configuring a username and password for websites that require authentication and changing the user-agent of the Pingdom service (which might make sense if third-party websites are monitored).
The final step of the process configured the notification options. Pingdom uses a contact database that can be filled with contacts that should be notified if a check fails. This can always be the same user or individual webmasters or system administrators depending on the website or even check that is performed.
Pingdom supports four types of notifications: SMS, Email, Twitter and iPhone. The number of available SMS depends on the account type. The free account comes with 20 SMS with the option to buy additional SMS if needed. An option that is missing is phone support which is offered by some other website monitoring services.
Reporting
Pingdom starts monitoring the configured services as soon as they have been created by the user. Reporting is one of the strengths of Pingdom.
The overview displays the most important data at a glance including the uptime, downtime and response time. This report can be filtered by data to provide an overview of a specific time frame.
Detailed reports are available for each website that is listed in the overview and from the sidebar menu.
Pingdom operates servers in many countries in the world that are used to monitor the configured websites, servers and services. Successful and failed attempts to connect will be written to an extensive log file that provides error analysis for some failed attempts. This includes information like the date and time of the operation, the datacenter used to perform the check and a traceroute which can be very helpful for the error analysis.
Pingdom Review Verdict
Pingdom offers a sophisticated web monitoring service with excellent reporting. The service is aimed at webmasters, system administrators and professionals mainly which is reflected in the interface which could use additional help overlays to guide the user through the creation. It would also be nice if they would add an option to receive phone notifications and if they would provide basic scripts to test specific services like MySQL databases.
But those are marginal and the overall experience and service lives up to its promises. The free basic account should be enough for many users who only run one website. Professionals on the other hand can use the basic and business account along with the optional services to monitor all their servers and websites.
Christmas Giveaway
We are giving away 10 Pingdom Basic Accounts that are paid for for one year. Please let us know if you currently use a website monitoring service and if so which to enter the draw for the accounts.
Raju is giving away two programs today: Corel Digital Studio 2010 and Corel Painter Essentials 4.
Beecher is giving away a copy of Team Fortress 2, best online fps game since UT99.
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Hi, currently I don’t use a website monitoring service to monitor my website. But hope I win one so that I can monitor the activity of my website, as I get quite a lot of down time on the website.
Thanks
I use siteuptime.com and montastic (which now sucks cuz they limited the amount).
I’m looking for a new service and would love to try pingdom. I’ve tried their free one and it’s pretty good but I wanted to see the premium version but didn’t feel like paying without having an idea of how it is.
Cool, How could I get account?
Hi, thanks for the giveaway, I currently use Google Analytics.
I currently use siteuptime, but only for just the absolute basics (i.e. free version)
I was hoping to get an account here
I don’t use a monitoring service, but i know i really need one…
Interesting – while I don’t use such a service yet, I would be interested.
Not using any services at the moment. But will love to have an account. Thanks.
thanks for the giveaway.
i really love this service and sure i would love to have an account
thanks much again
I would love an account thanks!
I don’t use any service like that at the moment. But I do check every hour (this routine is really bothering me now) manually by visiting my website on random page to make sure it is still up.
The truth is, this is the first time I heard of this service. Sounds very interesting for someone like me. Maybe one year license for this kind of service would help my life.
Thank you.
i presently use a trial account of websitepulse. will be glad to have a pingdom for my site.
Right now, I dont use any website monitoring service,but I would really like to have something that will release me to do that job manually.
I currently don’t use a website monitoring tool, but my websites have gone down a couple of times and it would be nice to know before anyone else.
i presently use a trial account of websitepulse. will be glad to have a pingdom for my site.
I’m not currently using a website monitoring service, but have used in the past numerous free services, and most of which have been unreliable. So this would make a great virtual stocking stuffer ;)
I don’t use any and would like to try this
Would love one of these accounts to monitor my different dedicated servers to test different providers’ uptime. Fantastic idea to give these away.
Wow, thats a loooooon post ;) I currently use the free version of Pingdom, and it is AWESOME, the SMS downtime alerts are pretty acurate and very usefull. I’d love to get me some free pingdom accountage ;)
Merry xmas Martin btw, how’s ya second year of full time blogging working out for you (especially in these tough economic times)?? And I think that now your site is way better and a nicer read than Lifehacker.com, I hope it stays that way…
Merry Xmas to you as well Rupert. Fulltime blogging is only going upwards for me. There are jumps (positive and negative) every now and then but the overall trend is very positive. Hope that continues until I retire ;)
Coolio, long may it continue indeed.
What happened to the edit comment button? It seems to have gone :(
I removed it because it loaded some Javascript and CSS on every page load. Figured that speed was more important than functionality.
loooooong not looooooon ;)
I’m currently using Pingdom free account but i love Pingdom services and would like to have one Basic account.
I don’t use any website monitoring service, so count me in.
Just signed up for the free version. Sounds like a nice service and I wouldn’t mind having a full blown account…
Thanks!
i dont have any web monitoring
this one could be nice to me
thanks
I am currently using Pingdom free account and http://www.howsthe.com/ for monitoring my website.
I would definitely like to have a Pingdom account for monitoring my website.
I’m admin on a website, but it has been DDoS’ed the last few weeks, so we’re planning to make some “load-balance” on the servers. So this would be a good opportunity to see how well the load-balance work :)
Please count me
Another great prize for the Chistmas Giveaway
I don’t have any website monitoring services, and this is the first time I heard about it, so I’m definitely interested.
I currently use MrUptime on Firefox, a Pingdom product, to monitor pages, but this would be so much more useful to me. I hope I can be considered for the giveaway.