The other day, I pointed out a website monitoring service that I found, WatchMouse. I’ve since found these competitors:
How would you use these services? If you have a web design client with an ecommerce site or any site that they worry is down, these services can be set up to send an email or SMS to their phone if their site crashes. It’s also a useful way to confirm that slow business on a site is not due to server hiccups.
The gold-plated solution is to use a web site monitoring service like these with a service like DNS Made Easy and a backup hosting service with your client’s site. DNS Made Easy, and similar services, monitors their site and switches to the backup site if there’s an interruption then switches back when the main server returns live. (Of course, you’re left to synchronize any transactions that might have happened on the backup server with transactions on the main server.)
At the least, a website monitoring service might be a painless way to help your clients get some peace of mind about their sites.
UPDATE 6/25/2009: I’ve blogged about two articles that point to 22 website monitoring services between them, with some overlap. The post is called (Mostly) Free Website Monitoring Tools.
URLs:
http://www.watchmouse.com
http://www.hyperspin.com
http://www.pingdom.com
http://www.montastic.com
http://scoutapp.com/
http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com
http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/2009/06/25/05.44.54/
