As a site owner or blogger, it is important to monitor the availability of your web servers. After all, what good is your content if readers can’t access it because your web server is down?

For a long time, I’ve been using Site Uptime to monitor my blog and the other sites I help manage. Although most of these sites are hosted with PlogHost, a couple still aren’t. I make it as sort of a condition to have sites hosted with PlogHost if someone asks me for help in putting out a website. I help run a few sites for free either because the site is owned by someone I know or I believe in their cause. (Note: The links above aren’t affiliate links, I’m not sending you to the site because I get paid for it but because I’ve never had problems with its services.)

Site Uptime, is a free website monitoring service that alerts you whenever your web server is down. Its free service checks your site every 30 minutes and alerts you when it is unavailable. For a long time, I was satisfied with its service, getting alerts once in a while when a server has problems. That was until I discovered Montastic.

Montastic is an even better service because it checks your web servers every 10 minutes. Since Montastic checks your servers more often, it’s more reliable in catching short website outages. When your server chokes, Montastic is more likely to alert you of it than Site Uptime.

There are times when I get alerted by Montastic and then I check the server to find it’s really down but that it goes up again in just a few minutes. Most of the time, this outage doesn’t get detected by Site Uptime because of its 30-minute free server check cycle.

What’s even better is that Montastic provides an RSS feed of your alerts. Site Uptime provides RSS feeds only for paying accounts.

Site Uptime, though, provides a monthly report of your availability but the data is skewed because of the relatively long time it takes between server-checking cycles. What you get is a bloated amount of site downtime.

Site Uptime, though, exceeds Montastic in one aspect of server monitoring: it monitors servers from different locations in the world so you are able to catch access problems from specific locations. Your site may be up but if it can’t be accessed in London, Site Uptime will alert you on that.

What I do with the different sites I run or help manage is set up a monitoring service by both Montastic and Site Uptime. Whenever Montastic alerts me that a site is down, I then perform a quick check with Site Uptime to get more data.

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