Web site monitoring is an important part of operating a web site, and it allows you to know when your site is down.  Fortunately, it’s easy to set up and you can monitor your web site for free using a web site that I have just found thanks to a post I found on ShanKrila that discusses an upgrade to an external website monitoring service.

After you build and deploy your web site, are you going to monitor it to ensure that you know it is up and running?  If your web site or blog goes down, are you going to know?

Monitoring your web site is part of your duties as  the web master of your domain.  If you don’t know when your site goes down, then who will?  Your customers?  Your boss?  Heh, the last thing you’d want is your boss finding out that the company site is down before you do.  That is never a good thing.

You can help to make yourself the first to know if there is a site outage by signing up with Montastic Website Monitoring Service.  It’s free, and really easy to set up monitoring for a web site.

I signed up for this service and loaded a number of my own sites into my profile.  Whenever one goes down, I will get an email alerting me to the outage so that I can take action on it in some way.  Montastic.com checks each web site about every 10 minutes.  Of course, if the load is great, that time may be a bit longer.  For a free web site monitoring service though, you can’t beat this.

You are able to monitor up to 100 web sites for free, and each site is checked from two different locations for redundancy.  On that same note, if you already have web site monitoring in place, you might consider this service for redundancy to your monitoring as well.

The Montastic site monitoring service also allows you to specify multiple recipients to receive alert emails also.  This is rather handy for teams of developers as you can imagine.

I highly recommend using this service if you are concerned about knowing when your web site is down.