Free Website Monitoring with Pingdom

If you are running your own blog or website then chances are that you often get paranoid about your site’s downtime. Personally I have switched at least a dozen of web hosts before I found just the right one that gave me almost 100% uptime to date.

And trust me, it not easy to find the right web host for you. I remember back in 2008, I was pretty active in the social media sites like – Digg, Reddit & Stumble Upon. I have got my website in the front page and got massive traffic from all these site over and over again. But the first time it happened, I was not ‘ready’ to handle all the traffic and my site went down within the first 10 mins. The host I was working with back then didn’t even want to admit that they just can’t handle this much traffic for the price I was paying.

But anyway, later I sort of got around that and tweaked my blog to make sure that such downtime won’t come again. But few days later it happened again…and then again! I was really frustrated as I was putting in a lot of effort at that time to get all these traffic, but every day I have a downtime of over 30-45 mins!

Thats when I switched to a new host – Hostgator (well they aren’t exactly new to me, I have done business with them since 2004), however I never really stuck with them because at that time their servers were a bit expensive for me. The projects I was running at that time required me to have a dedicated server and so I was always looking around for a more affordable solution. One lesson that i learnt is, if you trust a particular web host you should stick with them regardless of what their ratings/reviews say or how much they charge. Now I have a Reseller account with HG and I am running all my sites there without any problem.

Anyway, I am a bit off topic here, the main question on the table today is how do you know when your website goes down? You can’t obviously monitor in 24/7, right? So how do you know that your website is still up and running when you are asleep at 3 in the morning?

Monitor your Website for Free with Pingdom

After all my troubled experience with many web hosting companies, I heard about Pingdom from Yoast. They had a free 14 day trial, so I signed up and from that day onwards I never had to worry about my website’s downtime! Pingdom automatically checks my website every 1 min to see if my website is up and running. If it fails to access my site for any reason (e.g. site is down), Pingdom automatically sends an email and also an SMS to my mobile phone! Their online dashboard is rich with statistics and graphs which tells you exactly how long your site was down with detailed time stamps. So if your web host claims that they give you 99.9% uptime, you should use Pingdom to find out whether their claim is actually true or not.

Pingdom was not free and it was a paid service. However if your website is important to you, I don’t think you would mind paying that small fee. But many bloggers and small scale website would have found the price point a bit expensive. But guess what the good news is?!

Pingdom is Available for Free

Yes! Now you can Signup for a Free Pingdom account and monitor 1 website with 20 Free SMS Credit. It just takes 2 mins to signup and you are done! After you signup, Pingdom will start monitoring your website and will tell you everytime it goes down! And with the 20 Free SMS credit, you will be informed even when you are not in front of your PC.

And if you run out of that 20 SMS, then you need to seriously consider getting a new webhost! I’d seriously recommend you to go to Hostgator – They have awesome support and near 100% uptime.

You can signup for just 1 cent ($0.01) for the first month and try out their awesome service! Use the Coupon Code – “404PAGE”.

And don’t forget to Signup for a Free Piangdom Account and make sure that your website or blog is running 24/7!

Limitation of the Free Pingdom Account

There is actually no real limitation of the Free Pingdom Account. Its not some sort of trial offer, your account is completely free but you will only be able to monitor one website or server. So if you run one website/blog then this account is perfectly suitable for your needs. If you need to track more than one site, then you may want to signup for their paid service. For your free pingdom account to be kept alive you will need to log in to the Pingdom control panel at least once every 90 days.

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