There are several free services which let you know if a website is up or down. This can be particularly useful if you’re involved with more than one site but don’t look that frequently at them all.
My own favourite of these services at the moment is BinaryCanary. It lets you track up to five sites for free and offers a wide-range of technical options from the basic to the quite advanced, including a sliding scale of different escalation steps. At the simplest, you get an email alert if a site is down and then an email notification when it is back up.
That range of options leads to the one drawback I’ve come across, namely that whilst you can configure each monitoring service online using just the one web form, that form is rather complicated. The good news is that for the simplest options you largely just ignore the complicated parts of the form, but for novices it does mean you’ve got to be comfortable working through a form you don’t quite fully understand.
That said – it’s free, it caters well for British (rather than just American) users and it does a useful job. Thank you BinaryCanary.
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Hi Mark – thank you for this great article and endorsement.
I appreciate your point about the number of available options we provide. We’re working on a “easy setup wizard” to help more novice users get their monitoring setup.
Thanks again for your blog post!
That’s good to hear Dan. Thanks for stopping by.
Thanks Mark for sharing such a useful service.
Binary Canary might do a good job, but 5 sites for free is not very many… Montastic allows 100 sites for free and has been doing a fab job for me for many years: http://www.montastic.com/
The service I always use is the aptly named http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com . Quick, simple and fuss-free. It’s only for manual checks however. So I’ll have to check out BinaryCanary.
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:
BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
Yup, I find that very useful too Veron.
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
Nice a free stuff. I’ve used pingdom, AreMySitesUp and AlertX to check if my website is down, and use downforeveryoneorjustme to check if other’s websites are down. I will check out BinaryCanary later, thank you.
A choise besides pingdom. RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:
BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:
BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:
BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K
RT @markpack Keeping tabs on whether your sites are up or down:BinaryCanary http://bit.ly/3C689K