Relying on your hosting company to inform you each time your server is not reachable may incur additional cost that may not be justifiable. A simple and yet effective method is to “pinging” your servers on a regular basis to determine if it is reachable. pingdom provides this service to you by periodically “ping” your servers and notify you via email or SMS.
The basic pingdom package can be signed up for USD9.95 per year which includes monitoring of up to 5 different checks and it includes 20 free SMS. Other notable features of pingdom includes:-
- Uptime and response time reports
- API to allow you to include your uptime on your website
- ping is not the only way to check, you can do HTTP, TCP Port, SMTP, POP3 and other checks.
It does not only check from a single location, but from 12 different locations (at the time of writing and this changes over time). For small to medium size businesses, this may prove to be one of the most useful tool on ensuring your Internet presence. A really useful tool but with some minor reservations on SMS usage.
Ian Tan is a blogger that blogs about life, camera, photography and everything under the sun. You can find out more about him at his blog, IanTan dot net
i prefer to use pingdom tools to check my site loading time as well what element that is taking it’s time to load..
These pinging services are great to check up on a large network of sites without any setup on each of the sites. We use basicstate.com for some of our sites and it shows me which hosting companies I can trust and which ones really need to upgrade their servers.