Mon.itor.us: an even more fantastic free web server monitor

A comment on my previous post on using Montastic and Site Uptime to monitor your web servers led me to mon.itor.us: a free web server monitor that I signed up to a few months back but quickly forgot because I encountered problems when I first used it.

I revisted my mon.itor.us account and boy is it turning out to be a great service. If you’re a website owner or a blogger running your blog in a web hosting account, you should use mon.itor.us to keep tabs of downtimes of your web servers. (click on photo to view larger image) mon.itor.us interface

In the few days since I re-activated my account, I found mon.itor.us better than Montastic and Site Uptime’s free service combined. When I first used mon.itor.us, it was really slow and I wasn’t getting any idea that’s why I completely forgot about my beta account with the site. The site now loads faster and gives you a lot of data on the accessibility of the web servers you monitor.

What it offers:

Mon.itor.us monitors your web server from various locations and alerts you when the servers are down or the response time is slower than 3,000 ms. According to mon.itor.us, “having response time more than (3,000 ms) means your site is too slow and you might lose your clients.”

Mon.itor.us alerts you of downtimes via e-mail, instant messaging, SMS and RSS feeds. I tried the SMS alert but I never got any SMS message when mon.itor.us detected downtime in one of the sites I manage. Mon.itor.us does not specify in its site which mobile phone carriers they can send messages to. Mon.itor.us alerts sent via e-mail and its RSS feed for your server monitors are dependable.

In fact, mon.itor.us was able to detect downtimes not caught by the free Site Uptime account and Montastic in one of the web servers I manage.

Response times

Mon.itor.us also exceeds other services of its type because it also tracks the response times of your web servers. Montastic and Site Uptime just alert you whenever any of your servers are down. The two sites do not track how fast or slow your web servers are.

Mon.itor.us also archives the data it gathers in monitoring your web servers. You can have a graph of your site’s uptime records and web server response times, archived by the period when these data were taken. Neither Montastic nor Site Uptime has this.

Interface

Mon.itor.us has a better user interface than either Site Uptime or Montastic. It gives you an online workspace where you can organize your data and the servers you are monitoring.

The interface is done in Ajax, which allows you to add and edit services without having to load an entirely new page. Mon.itor.us also offers you the choice of different ways to present your data: as a table or as a bar or line graph (see photo).

If you run multiple blogs and sites in different server hosting accounts, you can arrange the data into different pages in your mon.itor.us workspace. This way, you get a better presentation of the hosting uptime and server response times of your different sites.

You can also monitor your competitor’s web server uptime and response times in your Benchmark Sites page. That way, you’d know if your competitor is using a better web hosting plan or company.

Mon.itor.us pledges in its blog that its basic services will remain free and that they’ll be monetizing it through ads. They said that they’ll only be charging for premium services that they’ll be adding later.

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10 responses

  1. This is cool. I’m going to try it out with my domain and blog. Thanks for posting about it.

  2. Thanks for positive response about mon.itor.us.
    As currently the service is in beta release, it doesn’t support SMS type of alert notification, but it definitely will!

  3. Dementia,
    Hope you find it useful 🙂

    mon.itor.us team
    nice to know that it will definitely have SMS alerts. I’m working to have it send an e-mail to an address that’s connected to my phone, in some telco carriers, you can receive e-mail at [email protected]

  4. Hi,

    I’m using eXternalTest, and I’m really happy with it. It’s also free for Bloggers, edu, and orgs… It’s really proffesional… Have a look..

  5. Thanks mon.itor.us team. We do perfect work.
    They have very high spead and very wonderful UI. I haven’t words about their charts and rich ajaxian desktop. I am very happy that we can use this free and modern site. It stands very high compare with another sites of this sphere.

  6. If you don’t check http://mon.itor.us recently, it is time to do it. It adds several new features – the most important is website traffic monitoring.

  7. Avoyan,
    Thanks for the update. Mon.itor.us is really a great service and one that I depend on for monitoring needs.

  8. MON.ITOR.US is offering an open API (Application Programming Interface) and open sourcing its components Monitis.org portal.

  9. Try pingdom.com too, we built it here at troxo.com, hope u like it 🙂

  10. Hey Max.. We also have a good one called http://www.ezwebsitemonitoring.com/ that does both uptime and SEO monitoring to track keyword rankings as well. It’s in free beta right now if you have time to check it out.

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