Just as your body needs nourishment to function, your website needs to be ready for users at all times. That’s why uptime monitoring tools are crucial for the proper functioning of your website, selling your product, and your business as a whole.
These tools monitor your website’s performance and alert you if there are any issues or downtime. This allows you to quickly identify and resolve any problems, ensuring that your website is always functioning at its best. As you can imagine, having an accessible site 24/7 helps you provide a better user experience, which is essential to improve customer experience and also for SEO.
In this post, we explore the best tools to monitor your website activity and get noticed when any problem arrives.
What Is Uptime Monitoring?
Uptime monitoring is about monitoring the uptime and availability of your website or web application.
If you’ve ever experienced a website outage, you know how frustrating it can be. You try to access your favorite site to buy something or catch up on the latest news. But suddenly the site is down. Most likely, you’ve to wait for the website to come back online so that you can complete your task.
The benefits of uptime monitoring are evident. When your business depends on an online presence, nothing is more important than knowing that your website is available when your customers need it most.
So, if your website goes down, you can quickly fix the problem thanks to uptime monitoring. This way, you’ll avoid missing out on potential customers and revenue due to downtime. It also lets you track your website’s performance over time. Thus, you’ll be able to improve it by adding more servers or upgrading the hardware, if necessary.
Why Is Website Monitoring Important?
Website monitoring will not only be essential to keep track of the availability and performance of your website or web app. It will also help you identify potential problems before they occur.
In other words, uptime monitoring tools can help prevent downtime and keep your website or web application running optimally.
These main elements that uptime tools will help you with will make your business more profitable. As they usually also give you feedback about what went wrong with your website and the process it has gone through. Also, it will promote conversion because when your website is down sales and marketing ads are interrupted.
How to Check if a Site Is Down?
There are many free and paid uptime monitoring tools that you can use to check if your website is down. Some of them even offer an API so you can integrate them with other services you run on your servers, such as an email service or platform.
Therefore, the best uptime monitoring tool depends on the specific needs of your website. Some of the more popular ones include Better Uptime, Uptime Robot, StatusCake, and Uptrends.
Free Monitoring Tools
Among the free uptime monitoring tool alternatives, there’s Better Uptime. This one offers a renewed approach to monitoring and checking your website every 30 seconds.
It has a combination of uptime monitoring, incident management, and downtime communication features. These will help you find out if your web page or app is not working in no time.
Better Uptime offers a free Basic subscription plan with free e-mail alerts, 3-minute checks, and 10 monitors. Paid plans start at $24 per month.
Uptime Robot offers website, SSL, ping, port, cron job, and keyword monitoring all in one tool. The Free plan includes 5-minute checks and 50 monitors. It also has a Pro plan which costs $7 per month and offers 5 times faster downtime detection.
StatusCake is another popular uptime monitoring tool right now. It not only tests your website’s availability automatically from over 28 countries worldwide. But also ensures that your domain is never lost. They alter users when it’s time to review a domain, or if its name records have been changed.
In addition, you can choose how you’re alerted when your website’s down. Email, SMS, Twitter, Slack, or Discord, are some of the many integrations the platform has to alert you about your website status. StatusCake offers a Basic free subscription with 10 uptime monitors and 5-minute tests.
Paid Monitoring Tools
Hyperping is a user-friendly uptime monitoring tool that gives teammates the ability to trigger alerts, encouraging collaboration between employees
The tool also displays the history of changes made by Hyperping in chronological order. It also integrates with Slack, PagerDuty, and SMS and is easy to set up. Hyperping’s monitoring capabilities are not limited to one location but can control 14 areas.
Uptrends is one of the most popular uptime website paid tools. It has a more aesthetic platform and it helps users maintain performant websites and APIs with high availability. It combines website monitoring with reliable alerting to help you resolve your site issues quickly. Therefore, it helps improve your overall performance as a business or startup.
Uptrends offers a 30-day free trial. The paid plans start with the Starter plan for $16.21 per month.
Site 24×7 is an easy-to-use tool that monitors almost everything related to your website and works 24/7. The tool has paid versions that start at $9 per month. However, it also offers you a 30-day free version that lets you discover and test the product. In addition, it has helpful customer service and support. As well as customizable alert and notification options.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is a website down?
A website can be down due to several reasons. These include:
- Viruses.
- Hardware failure.
- Software problems such as a server crash.
- Internet connection issues.
- Updates that were not done properly (human error).
What message do you get when a website is down?
The kind of messages you receive during downtime depends ultimately on the kind of tool you’re using. For example, Better Uptime provides users with an incident audit timeline where they get a second-by-second timeline for every incident with detailed information about what happened and who got alerted.
On the other hand, Uptime Robot alerts users through messages such as “One monitor is down!” or “Your service is down for 1 hour” while clarifying how many monitors are working correctly.
Lastly, website uptime monitoring is essential for businesses and startups who need to stay connected online. These can alert you when your site or web app is down, and help you fix problems quickly before your customers are affected.
The best tool for you will depend on the kind of website you have, how much are you willing to pay, and the features you need!
