ServiceUptime is a service I’ve been using for some months now, to track possible downtimes on my blog. It is a good service that checks your website from multiple locations every once in a while, to see if there aren’t any outages. They offer a free plan, which is limited to one website checked every 30 minutes, and some premium plans which a check period as small as 1 minute, SMS notification (after x unsuccessful attempts), double check and a lot of other features. But, their free plan is doing very well too.
When you log in at ServiceUptime, you get a very detailed overview of your website’s uptime over the last months. You can click to view daily, weekly and yearly summaries. All these summaries include a table with the amount of checks executed, how many of them failed and when, and what the average response time was. This is also converted to percentages, and then displayed in a diagram next to the summary. In short, all you need is there. And, you can download is as a CSV file too.
However, more interesting is that you can not only check websites, but also the HTTPS, POP3, IMAP, FTP or other custom ports on your server. You can also request a web page to contain a certain word, to be sure your website is not only up, but also running. To be notified when your site is down, you can set up free e-mail notifications, but you can also buy SMS notifications. This costs $2.50 for 10 SMSes, $11.50 for 50 or $20 for 100. These SMSes are available worldwide, so you don’t have to be in the US to receive SMS notifications.
In conclusion, ServiceUptime is a great service, it does exactly what it should do. I’ve been using it for some months now, and I’m very happy with the results. Before, when I couldn’t retrieve my site, I never quite knew it was a problem on my end or on my server’s. Now, I can be completely sure my site was down or not, and for how long.
