In the hyper-competitive business landscape, the last thing any business wants is a poorly performing business website. Website downtime can lead to financial and reputational losses. It’s critical for webmasters and business decision-makers to be on top of their website availability and performance issues to ensure they deliver the best customer experience, with timely maintenance and optimizations. This is where website performance monitoring practices come into the picture. One of these practices is uptime monitoring, which helps webmasters receive uptime and downtime statistics and alerts.
How to Get Instant Website Down Alerts
Ping, which tests if a host is reachable, is one of the most basic tools to check website availability. While an administrator can manually monitor website ping times using the command line interface, web performance monitoring tools automate this task and provide alerts for downtime. There are several open-source, freemium, and commercial tools available to help you get website downtime alerts via SMS, email, Slack, Hipchat, and more. Many of these tools also offer geographically distributed servers to check website uptime and downtime across different regions.
We’ll discuss some of these tools in this article; however, before we do so, it’s important to understand that while getting downtime alert is crucial, it’s preferable to avoid website downtime altogether. With regular monitoring of page speed, transactions, and various response times, website administrators can diagnose problems in advance and better prevent potential downtime.
Let’s get a brief overview of some of the best tools for website down alerts and monitoring website performance.
SolarWinds Pingdom
SolarWinds® Pingdom® is a popular tool for automated monitoring of website availability and performance-related issues. Pingdom is simple to use and can be set up typically within minutes. The tool pings a website from more than 100 test servers across the globe to track localized issues. Administrators can perform automated website checks every minute and get an instant alert for downtime. The tool double checks every incident to reduce false positives. You can receive alerts via SMS, email, and push notifications, or via integrations with OpsGenie, PagerDuty, Slack, and VictorOps.
While an instant alert about a website outage is crucial, administrators often need more context for troubleshooting. Pingdom helps you get to the root cause of an outage by running additional tests and performing a root cause analysis. These test results are available under Pingdom Uptime Reports. You can also get historical data about a website’s availability for analysis. Moreover, Pingdom offers page speed monitoring, transaction monitoring, and real user monitoring features, which make it an exceptional tool for monitoring website performance.
To get used to its features and assess its capabilities, you can get a free trial of Pingdom for 14 days; the plans start at $10 per month.
Uptime
Uptime is another highly capable uptime monitoring tool offering availability monitoring from 30 global locations and website checks on a 60-second frequency. Teams can also choose their preferred mode (SMS, email, etc.) for receiving downtime alerts. They can also get graphical reports from the tool to understand website performance patterns over time. The tool doesn’t pose any limitations on the number of tests, including ping, SSH, DNS, email, and more, and its basic plan starts at $16 per month. However, you can get a free evaluation of Uptime for 21 days to get started.
Dotcom-Monitor
Dotcom-Monitor is an advanced web performance monitoring tool, which can also track APIs and web services. The tool offers website checks with a frequency of 1 to 180 minutes from 30 locations across the globe. It offers several features for troubleshooting website performance issues. Teams can track downtime and performance issues using real-time charts and metrics. The tool is useful for operations teams seeking visibility into their infrastructure and allows developers to perform load/stress testing. However, if you’re looking for a simple tool to check website availability and receive instant alerts for downtime, Dotcom-Monitor can be a bit complex and costly—its basic plan starts at $19.95 per month.
Site24x7
Site24x7 offers uptime monitoring from servers across 110 locations in 54 countries. These servers check the website every minute, and teams can configure thresholds to receive alerts for an outage. The tool offers comprehensive monitoring, including both synthetic and real user monitoring features. It’s an affordable solution with plans starting at $9 per month.
Free Tools
If you’re looking for a free tool to get website down alerts, consider UptimeRobot, a simple and reliable tool offering HTTP(S), response time, ping, and port monitoring. You can perform website checks every 5 minutes and receive alerts for downtime on email. As a free tool, it doesn’t offer alerts via SMS, voice call, or any third-party integrations, although you can get these by choosing its commercial plans. There are also several open-source tools to help in monitoring website availability. Zabbix is one such tool with several integrations to monitor IT components, including servers, networks, virtual machines, and cloud services, and can help you get instant alerts for website outage. However, being open-source, the solution requires complex configurations and a deep understanding of IT infrastructure and services.
Where to Get Started?
We have listed some of the popular paid and commercial tools to get alerts for a website outage. In addition to the budget, you should consider the future scope and requirements of website monitoring and opt for a scalable solution. At the same time, you should evaluate the tool in terms of usability and ease of deployment. Though open-source solutions offer flexibility and cost advantages, they require significant time and effort in initial setup and maintenance. Considering all these factors, we recommend a free trial of SolarWinds Pingdom, a simple, affordable, and comprehensive web availability and performance monitoring solution.