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"Everyone seems to have their own website or blog nowadays. But do you want someone else to tell you your site is down? So what do you do? Corporate IT shops can install some fancy monitoring software suite that can track hundreds of types of software, servers, ports and hardware devices. That monitoring software also normally costs hundreds of thousands for dollars. Most likely, you want to monitor your website for free, or at least cheaply.\nNot surprisingly there are a wealth of free and cheap website monitoring services available. Just do a Google search for \"free website monitor\" and you will get plenty of services to look at. For most of the services, you only need an email address and the URL that you want to monitor. Of course, when it comes to free and cheap you have a wide range of services offered. To make your job easier, we've put together this list of 13 services that will help you monitor your website.\n\nPingdom - Has a good set of cheap packages, but alas, nothing is free. They come highly recommended by just about everyone.\nLiveWatch - A German service that allows you to monitor one server free. The free notifications package contains email alerts, 10 SMS notifications, and Yahoo Messenger. The only problem with the service is that it requires a script on the server in order to monitor it.\nObservu - A really, really basic service. You register, add a website monitor with the text that should appear on the page and save the monitor. There are no reports and nothing flashy. You will be emailed if there is a problem.\n\nServerGuard24 - The prices are not that expensive and there is a free plan. However, the free plan only polls every 40 minutes and you need a banner ad for them as well. Otherwise, it looks like a very professional service.\nSiteUptime - One free and two cheap premium levels are offered. The free plan allows only one monitor, but it does have a very clean and professional user interface. The service only monitors from location but it does fall over to another location if needed.\nHost Tracker - The free plan enables monitoring for two URLs in two different domains. The main issue with the service is that the navigation is hard to work with. It does use the most distributed network of monitoring servers of the services listed, as it currently monitors from over 50 nodes.\nmon.itor.us - Yes, it has a cute name, but cute does not mean limited. The service is completely free with email alerting. There are basic reports for uptime and response time. The user interface may look simplistic, but the service delivers with a more complete offering than most.\nInternetSeer - \"My site has been down for how long!?!\" The free offering monitors one URL and polling every hour. The professional plans look to have some really nice features, but the free plan is fairly limited.\nWatchMouse - You have to like a service that uses a mouse as its mascot. The free plan monitors one URL every hour. Disappointingly, the premium plans are more expensive than most listed here.\nServiceUptime - They have a nice free service that monitors one URL. There are seven different sites polling every 30 minutes to determine whether your website is alive. ServiceUptime also has a decent reporting package and very reasonable premium packages.\nMontastic - Montastic allows free monitoring for up to 100 URLs! Your websites are monitored by two different servers about every 10 minutes. They also have a cute colored logo you can put on your site. Sadly, there are no cute colored reports.\nFreeSiteStatus - The free service has nine separate locations monitoring you servers every minute. Various additional features can be purchased for little cost, as well as a service configuration wizard to help you create your monitoring service. One cool feature FreeSiteStatus offers is the ability to create one-time or recurring maintenance windows where monitoring of the servers can be suspended.\nSite24x7 - It is free to monitor two URLs that are polled every 60 minutes. This is another service that allows you to create maintenance windows for your server. The premium plans also offer reasonable prices for various levels of monitoring."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/08/25/free-and-cheap-website-monitoring-services/>