Freemium tools are great and when you run a server with numerous client websites on it a free uptime monitoring tool is very welcome; And this latest tool, UptimeRobot is excellent.
A few years back, Shawn Hogan from Digital Point had a ThinkGeek Ambient Orb which alerted him to when his server’s load went beyond a certain point. The gadget was basically connected to the pager network and when the load hit a certain level the server sent a message to the orb and it changed colour.
I did something similar and had a service SMS me when my site was under load sending me the “skies are grey” message, “skies are black” if it ever suffered any downtime, and “skies are blue” when the server was back up after anything substandard performance. My girlfriend saw the message flash up on the front screen of my 2006 Samsung flip phone when I was driving one day – she thought it was cool.
But this UptimeRobot is a really cool service. I have all the 22i Design website clients in there and, if there’s ever an issue with the server, I get a notification email. There’s room for 50 websites in the stack so I have my employer’s website in there too. We’ve had occasional server load issues when we’ve driven far too much traffic at the website and some occasional spikes have caused it to fall over at times. So to be alerted, especially out of hours, when you’re not at your desk with the luxury of all the screens in front of you, is really helpful.
If you have a website and need the peace of mind of having a service like UptimeRobot alerting you to status changes, then you can either take up hosting through 22i and we’ll monitor you anyway, or you can sign up to UptimeRobot for yourself (Affiliate link)
If you need help with website hosting or implementing UptimeRobot for your local business website, call us on 01252 692 765 to discuss your project.