Ive found the best website monitoring service :-)

There's a pretty good explanation here: http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/web-site-monitoring.asp

well, at http://www.nmsalert.com we do several tests to monitor your server.

the default configuration works like this:

we check every 5 minutes if your server is alive (PING).

if the server is alive, we check, if the services you specified are running (like HTTP, DNS, FTP, SMTP or many others).

In case of a failure, we try again 3 times, if they all fail, you get alerted by email, fax or sms on your mobile.

ciao,
markus
http://www.nmsalert.com

Personally, I'd rather use software that I pay for once, and install and run on my own system.

I shopped around a few of the website monitoring services and see that if you want to monitor 1 (one) URL once every 5 minutes, it can cost from US$10/month to US$25/month. That's one bloody URL!

Or you can buy a program like WebWatchBot (http://www.webwatchbot.com) and pay a one-off fee of US$199

Go with software not the online stuff and save some money.

Great. So you will know when YOU can access your website and how long YOUR computer takes to download the site and whether YOUR password is functioning and whether YOU can submit the forms.

The reason website monitoring services cost more, if because they perform multiple functions from multiple locations around the globe to tap into the traffic flow og the Internet's backbone. All the leading services are spread across the world.

But then again, I saved money when I bought that home lobotomy kit, so who am I to talk.

Personally I think this is SPAM. Afterall this thread is a year old!

We actually just went through the process of shopping for a robust monitoring solution. We used to use (and still do) siteuptime for general server pings and an overall indication of server uptime stats. However, we found them, and similar services lacking in serious monitoring capabilities...

We ended up going with IPCheck. I cant recommend this solution enough. Installs on any Windows system and THOROUGHLY and accurately monitors and reports on pretty much any service you can think of. The really nice part is we installed it on one of our local PC's and then rented a windows VPS from a 3rd party and instantly have monitoring from 2 locations off of our network (will probably add another small VPS in Europe eventually to get an idea of what those folks are experiencing on our servers...)

Anyway - as far as commercial grade stuff goes, I highly recommend people give this a try -

Please try http://www.ez-noc.com

We use http://www.siteuptime.com as well as the pre-provided service from our data centers.

asterisk: In my personal opinion, connections in the home aren't stable enough to trust with something like the uptime of your website. Plus it always helps to have multiple sources in case there are routing issues between yourself and the site.

I use HPulse.com now for my sites and server.
It can send a jabber message, e-mail or SMS on failure or slow responses.
I can type any custom message in notification.
You can check features at http://hpulse.com/features.xhtml and try it for free.

Most of them just ping your website every now and then and document if there is a response or not, they use this data to "calculate" your uptime.

HPulse.com not only ping, it monitor HTTP, FTP, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, SSH, Jabber/XMPP and can give you RSS channel with response times of ping/TCP-connect/TCP-response. For details look at http://hpulse.com/features.xhtml

Hi all!
Have you tried http://mon.itor.us ? Its really cool and its free.
It allows to monitor your website performance and availability. It also provides such services as visitors tracking, the Uptime Snapshot widget at Google, Yahoo!, Live, Netvibes, MAC OS X Desktop !
Snapshot is also available on Mobile at this url: http://mobile.monitis.com .
You can add your tests at mon.itor.us site and view
the latest state of real time monitored sites via Uptime Snapshot.

Well, I'll throw my hat in the uptime monitor ring, and suggest:

basicstate.com

You get most of the functionality of the big services, and pay nothing.

MON.ITOR.US released premium service http://monitis.com. It monitors sites every 5 minutes. Five checks are free. It provides external and internal monitoirng.

Very attractive interface!

Really, good. But do you really want to be woken up in the middle of the night when the site goes down temporarily for a routine reboot?

Happens all the time about 3am to me !