Would you be affected at all? Would you be able to access other systems and use them until Google would be up again? One serious problem with a company that has such a large market share is that their demise would affect a large part of the population. Pretty much everyone would be affected in one way or another if Google services would not be accessible anymore.

The Download Squad published an article yesterday about Google being down for 18 minutes. It turned out to be a false alarm and a problem of the Internet Provider Verizon and not Google.

Imagine how much buzz a downtime of an hour or two would create on the Internet. So, coming back to the initial question. What would you do and how would you be affected if Google went down right now?

Related posts

• Why Google Search Results Can Be Different (4)
• Using Google to find Free Mp3 files 2 (11)
• Two New Google Trends Features (0)
• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)
• Spice Up Google Search With Google Fx (4)

The Integrio Uptime Scout monitors your websites in an interval that can be specified between 30 seconds to 30 minutes and logs any failure to connect to it. The log can be useful to create a uptime statistic for your website which can be used to decided if it is time to change the hoster. Logfiles are useful but do not change the fact that the website is currently unavailable.

The software can be configured to send out an email to an unlimited number of email recipients informing them that the website is currently unavailable and also when the website is available again. A clever way to use this would be to send the email straight to your mobile phone or PDA which would ensure that the downtime would be kept to a minimum.

While those two features are nice for themselves the ability to run a program or script on the local computer when a check fails is probably the main reason for using the software. Each website can point to it’s own script or application. Those scripts could for instance restart apache, reboot a dedicated server or send an email to the hoster informing them about the downtime and asking for assistance.

There is only one negative aspect. The software has to be running to monitor your websites and servers. I know that some users can’t or won’t leave their computers running all the time but I do not know of a comparable service that is running as a web service. Would not that be a niche market ?

Related posts

• Web CEO Free (1)
• Stay Away From Dreamhost (16)
• Google Adsense Revenue and Traffic Comparision (4)
• Check if a website is revealing email addresses (3)
• Blogtastique (4)

Once you have grown your traffic to a fairly decent amount, however, downtimes that affect your site are a complete different story, a nuisance that can mean that hundreds of people are unable to get to your site, most of whom are likely to never come back again. In my experience, even when my hosting company promised 99.8% uptime, this began to increasingly seem like meaningless marketing hype when I started getting emails from friends and strangers alike informing me that my site was down at such and such an hour (many of which downtimes occurred in the early am hours when I wouldn’t have been online anyway).

I also noticed that the net effect of this was that I was becoming a bit paranoid; if my traffic seemed lower than it usually is I immediately wondered if me site had been down. I started looking for a resource that would monitor my site for downtimes and inform me automatically so I didn’t have to spend time wondering about it. This is when I found Montastic.

Montastic is a very simple service: create an account then enter in the URLs of the sites you would like it to monitor (up to a limit of 100 sites). It will then check the sites on your list within 10 minute intervals and from 2 locations. If and when it detects that any of the sites are down, it will immediately report this by email or through RSS. Once the site is back up it will report that as well.

What’s interesting about Montastic is that you are not limited to just your sites. After listing my 3 websites I decided to include 2 blogs that are similar to my main blog just for benchmarking purposes. To my surprise I discovered that while my site went down for about 2 hours once this week, these other sites seemed to be down for a few hours at least every other day, which was interesting to know, and made me think that perhaps my hosting company isn’t so bad after all.

Montastic was created by a team of “open source fanatics” that developed it for their own use and decided to make it available to everyone as a 100% free service.

Related posts

• Webmaster Contact Software (1)
• Monitor Your Servers With Livewatch (4)
• Get Notified If Other Websites Use Your Articles (6)
• Yahoo Server Monitor Widget (0)
• Why Stumbleupon is better than Digg for Webmasters (11)