Website Monitoring Services Review

What is Web Site Uptime Monitoring Service?

A Web site uptime monitoring service allows monitoring Webpages, sites, servers or ports by sending requests to the user’s server and check the availability. A service can test the server to see if the Web server is running well, and can notify when Web server is experiencing downtime.

The Web site uptime monitoring service can check HTTP pages, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, Telnet, SSL, TCP and a range of other ports with great variety of check intervals from every 4 hours to every one minute.
Web server monitoring services are used by individuals, ecommerce companies, small businesses, ISPs and Web hosting providers to effectively monitor server uptime from outside thier own network.

How it Works?
Web site uptime monitoring services usually have a number of servers around the globe - USA, Europe, Asia, Australia and other locations. By having multiple servers in different geographic locations, monitoring service can determine if a Web server is available across different Networks worldwide. The more locations the better picture on your website availability.

When you check uptime from a single computer using a single internet connection it's possible that your network is down, or that you cannot reach your website because of your ISP. You should make sure that the monitoring service uses multiple servers in different locations!

To monitor a Web page on a server (such as your homepage), the service sends out simple requests from worldwide locations to check if your services like HTTP or SMTP are accessible. By checking for a valid response code for HTTP/HTTPS, they are able to determine the accessibility of your pages. They can ping the server, router by name or by IP address. Sometimes when the service pings the server it may return ok result but default Apache page may be displayed instead of your website. That's why there is also a Webpage monitoring. Webpages are usually checked for particular keyword making sure it is your website which is currently displayed.

If a request to the server failed by one of the locations, monitoring service will try again from another location in a row. If the second attempt fails as well and your server still does not respond, the Web site monitoring service notifies you of a problem.

The ways of problem notifications varies between services, with options including: Email, SMS, phone, ICQ, MSN, Pager, etc. but in fact Email and SMS notifications are usually sufficient. For Web hosting companies, this can be particularly useful to catch any server downtime issues quickly - before customers let them know of their downtime.