Monitor Your Website Hosts Uptime

Remember, even if you have access to your raw log files, downtime on your server may be missed. After all, even the best website logs can't tell you if someone didn't arrive, or even if your pages were loading at an unreasonably slow speed. This is where remotely hosted uptime testers come in handy! These free monitoring services will alert you if there's a problem with your website being down, slow or unavailable for any reason. They also will help keep your mind at ease if all is well.

Service Uptime
Their free service will check your website every 30 minutes and will archive those statistics so you can look back later and see if your host has changed their quality of service. You can reset your uptime stats any time you want in case you change host or have another reason you want to start monitoring fresh. A nice thing about this one is they also double check so you don't get false alerts (ie. maybe your host was fine but something in between had a problem). If you want to show your stats, they do offer public and private monitoring.

SiteProbe
Hourly uptime status check that offers immediate alerts by email, cell phone or pager and they've added their 'second opinion' service to ensure that any downtime reported is accurate. To keep your monitor monitoring, you will need to log in once every 30 days. This is just to make sure you are still interested and they aren't wasting their resources.

@Watch
@Watch offers a free 14 day trial service of their uptime notification tool. That will probably be enough time to see if it's time to switch hosts if yours is in question. Interesting features this monitoring service offers are links and image checking, alerts by cell, pager, email or fax with false alert protection, trace route reporting as well as daily and weekly reports.

Google Webmaster Tools
While this isn't an uptime monitor it is a free service that Google provides that does give a unique perspective of any downtime and server problems you may have. They show you what URLs were unreachable by their spiders, any that timed out, if your robots.txt is blocking anything and a few handy stats about how well you are listed and crawled by Googlebot. I was recently using this on one of my sites and was rather astonished (and horrified) at how many pages were uncrawled due to server timeouts. If Googlebot can't get in, odds are neither can your visitors. This service is still in (open) beta at the time of this review, but I haven't experienced any negative side effects from trying it. I have however been given a glimpse into possible reason why a site I own isn't doing well. (Seeing my other web hosts downtime through the eyes of Googlebot is what got me reviewing free website monitors right now.)