Even a little bit of downtime on your website can have serious consequences in terms of lost revenue and customer loyalty. If your site goes down, you need to know about it as soon as possible. Of course, most of us have better things to do than to constantly check our sites to make sure they are functioning. That’s where Pingdom comes in.
Pingdom checks your sites periodically and alerts you of any problems. You can choose to be alerted via SMS, email or both. Plus, Pingdom will perform an error analysis to help you figure out what the problem is, so that you can get your site back up as quickly as possible.
Pingdom’s service is similar to Are My Sites Up?, a service we’ve reviewed before on Useful Tools. Which service is right for you? Well, that depends on how many sites you need to monitor, how often you need them to be checked, and how much you want to pay. Pingdom’s free plan lets you monitor one site only with unlimited email alerts and a max of 20 sms alerts. You can tell Pingdom how often you want it to check your site, up to once a minute.
Are My Sites Up? has a free plan that lets you monitor up to 5 sites at a time, but it will only check every 60 minutes to make sure they are up. Are My Sites Up? Premium plans top out at $95 per year, which allows you to monitor 100 sites and get checks every 15 minutes. Pingdom has a basic plan for $9.95/month that allows you to monitor 5 sites, and a business plan for $39.95 per month that allows you to monitor up to 30 sites.
So, Are My Sites Up? is significantly cheaper but doesn’t check your sites as often as Pingdom does. Pingdom also offers significantly more in-depth error analysis. While Are My Sites Up? only gives you the HTML status error code, Pingdom’s error analysis includes the following (quoted from the Pingdom website):
Resolving of the host name to see that the DNS lookup is working
A traceroute to help identify network issues
The content is loaded (if possible) and saved to see the response (for HTTP checks, this includes the HTML page and the HTTP response header).
Pingdom has a well-designed user interface that’s easy to navigate. As a bonus, you don’t have to add any code to your site-just give Pingdom the URL and it’ll take over from there.
Which service do you think is the best-Pingdom or Are My Sites Up? Let us know in the comments!
Our Rating of Pingdom
Categories:web