Web Site Availability Monitoring

[Websquad]

Somewhere in the recent past I came across a service that would monitor your website and dispatch an Email to you if they didn't get a response. As I recalled, monitoring once a day was free and there was a charge for more frequent monitoring.

Alas, I failed to bookmark the page. My bad!

Anyone know about this service?

Thanks !!

[Faithhb_lutheran]

Bob,

You talking about this site siteuptime.com (http://www.siteuptime.com/) I've heard of things like this in the past, but I have never understood the need, set your staffs homepage to the corporate site, and you get the same thing done.

[Websquad]

Thanks, this is exactly what I needed. My situation is a 'tad different ... I have about 15 web sites on the same server, so with Site Up Time I can monitor one of them (it checks every 30 minutes) to give me an indicator of the health of the server.

Should my monitored account not respond, I have it set up to send an Email to my BlackBerry. I can then use its web browser to check my other sites, and contact my hosting service if I confirm a problem.

Thanks for your help!

[Danny Carlton]

I tried one of those services and they pestered me to death because they kept using bad connections. The most reliable that I've found are various Yahoo Widgets. It's more of a real time monitoring than an email thing, but it helps me keep an eye on how my server's doing. The most dependable so far that I've found is Info URL (http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/?search=info+url), but it needs to be in conjunction with a php script on your server. Here's the code for the script I use...
<?php
if(file_exists("/proc/loadavg"))
{
$load = str_replace(' ', ' ', file_get_contents("/proc/loadavg"));
echo $load;
}
?>
Save that as a file, and set the Info URL widget to use it. The actual HTML display of the file looks something like...

0.81 1.88 2.08 1/200 32289

...showing the load averages, running processes and current process. The output of the PHP file can be modified, but the widget will poll the file at whatever interval you set and display the output. With it I can monitor the load on my server by simply looking at my desktop.