Mon.itor.us, a free service that monitors the availability of your web server, now sends weekly PDF reports on the uptime of your websites. The report provides a snapshot of the availability of your site within the week. The weekly PDF report seemed a recent addition to its already formidable lineup of services. This is still the second time I’ve received one.

PDF REPORT. Mon.itor.us sends a weekly report on the availability of servers you are monitoring. Click on image to enlarge.

Of course, you can always go to your mon.itor.us account to view detailed statistics not only on your web server availability but also on response times. Mon.itor.us monitors web server performance from three different locations—Germany, Austria, and the United States.

Of all the free web server monitoring services I tried, mon.itor.us is the most consistent and dependable. It’s is usually the first to alert me whenever any of the sites I monitor is down. This means mon.itor.us checks availability more frequently than the other services.

Mon.itor.us also provides its users detailed records of the response times of web servers. You can view the response time of your site, from which country and on what hour of any given day since you signed up for its service.

I’ve previously written about how to use mon.itor.us to compare web hosting providers. I still continue monitoring blogs with Media Temple and Dreamhost to help me on my choice of company to sign up with. I’m currently on a shared server account with A Small Orange and I’m happy with its service. I’ve decided to sign up for another year with them, this time on a bigger plan.

If you’re scouting for a web server, list a few that you think fits your needs and budget. Then sign up with mon.itor.us and monitor the uptime of sites hosted with them. After a month or two, you can get a snapshot of the quality of services of companies in your shortlist.

Let me just stress, though, that mon.itor.us checks the following services: HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SIP, TCP, UDP, Imap, SMTP, Pop3, ping, and DNS. Even if you get a hundred percent HTTP uptime but your server’s database performance sucks, you’ll still get a lot of downtimes if you use a database-driven system, such as WordPress or Drupal, to manage your site’s content.

Here are the February to March performance of servers I monitor with mon.itor.us. A clarification, the statistics are of only a single site in a web server company. Other sites on the same web host may have better or worse availability records.

A Small Orange

A Small Orange stats. Hosted on Zooomr

As I said earlier. I’m happy with my A Small Orange account and I’m signing up with them for another year. The company’s technical support is also good and their staff, in my experience, usually responds to e-mail support in less than two minutes.

Media Temple

Media Temple stats Hosted on Zooomr

I only started actively monitoring services of server companies after MediaTemple announced its GridServer hosting. I wanted to find out whether it could deliver on its 100 percent uptime promise, knowing that my hosting plan is set for renewal in a few months. The first few weeks of the service was characterized by frequent downtimes but it’s much better now.

Dreamhost

Dreamhost availability Hosted on Zooomr

Dreamhost offers cheap plans but I’ve read several complaints on downtimes.

Ploghost

Ploghost availability Hosted on Zooomr

Ploghost is the webhosting company of Abe Olandres, who is probably the Philippine’s most well-known blogger. When the Cebu Citizens-Press Council decided to put up a website, there was no question that Ploghost would be its best choice. I wanted a hosting company I can trust to help look into the site once I turn it over to the council. Ploghost, as you can see above, offers excellent uptime.

Max Limpag

Max is a journalist and blogger based in Cebu. He has written and edited for such publications as The Freeman, The Independent Post, Today, Sun.Star Cebu, Cebu Daily News, Philstar Life, and Rappler.

He is also a mobile app and web developer and co-founded InnoPub Media with his wife Marlen.