Server Monitoring – > Montastic

When you run websites for a living, one of the worst things that can happen, and it tends to happen more regularly than any of us would want, is having your server go down. Worse though is having your server go down, and not find out about it until several hours later. Finding out that your server has been down for several hours while you were out and about living your life sucks.

Enter: server monitoring!

There are many server monitoring services available. Since I’m bootstrapping this List Central business, I have to keep all bills as low as possible. The lower the better, and free is best. With cost control in mind I went out to find a server monitoring service that fit my budget. There are many free ones out there, and I tried a couple. One I tried, Internet Supervision, was pretty awesome with a free trail that provided checks of my websites every 15 minutes. But as all good things come to an end, so did my 90 day trail, and checks of my web site slowed down to once a day.

Luckily a friend had just recommended Montastic. With the tag phase “The free website monitoring service that doesn’t suck”, Montastic doesn’t lie. For the low, low cost of zilch, Montastic will check any page you like, up to every 30 minutes. When Montastic discovers your website is down, it will email you about it. Combine this with a push email smart phone, and you’ll always know, with in 30 minutes, when your site goes down. They also supply an RSS feed of your servers status, for those that host their email on the server they want checked. Of course, you can up grade your Montastic account to get them to check your site up to every 5 minutes. This fancy account is quite reasonable, at $5 a month Motastic with check up to 15 websites for you, every 5 minutes. That’s pretty sweet deal, which I will be signing up for when List Central is getting significant traffic.

Thank you Montastic, for not sucking!