Monitoring your website is not only for big corporate sites – with the prices of today, everybody can do it and it’s especially important if you’re somewhat dependent on your website, or blog, to be online as much as possible. There’s no way you yourself will be able to monitor your site 24/7, that’s why you can sign up with services like Monitis which will do the work for you – and send you daily/weekly/monthly reports to let you know how much uptime, and downtime, your website has. The more downtime you experience, the more visitors (customers) you will lose.
I was approached by Monitis.com and given the opportunity to try out their service. Up until now I’ve only used a free monitoring service which doesn’t check my site too often and only sends an e-mail when my site doesn’t respond, that’s about it, so I was excited to get started with Monitis and see what else was out there. As it turns out, Monitis is far more advanced than my previous monitoring service provider and the main target group for Monitis are probably not the average blogger (like me), but companies or serious bloggers, for who website uptime is really important.
After signing up with Monitis and logging in, you’re presented with an “easy start wizard” that will guide you through the setup of a new monitor, for example if you want an external monitor to keep an eye on HTTP, e-mail and MySQL services on your server.
Once set up, Monitis will monitor your services as often as you want, it can be once a minute or just once every 10 minutes, it’s up to you and depends on the plan you subscribe to. Then you should continue to decide what notifications you want when Monitis detects a failure, like receive an e-mail or maybe a SMS text messages on your mobile.
Another cool feature of Monitis, which I did test though, is their LoadTester. Enter one or more URL’s you want to test, tell LoadTester how many node counts (load generator servers) to perform, the duration, connections per node and from where the node should come from (USA or Europe). A 2 node count for 5 minutes with 100 connections per node, from the US, will cost you $8.36. LoadTester immediately tells you how much it will cost to perform the test, before you start. With LoadTester you can find out what your website/server will be able to handle so you can fix potential problems before real traffic might crash it at a later time.
Monitis offers three plans. Their Basic plan is $9.98/month or $95.80/year and will test your site every 5 minutes. It also includes 20 SMS or 10 phone calls per month in case of alerts. The Plus plan is $39.98/month or $383.80/year and will also test your site every 5 minutes as well as do a full page test every 20 minutes. It includes 100 SMS or 50 phone calls. The third plan is a “Your Plan” which you can configure to your own needs.
Check it out at www.monitis.com – there’s a free two week trial so you can try it out before you decide to buy.
Nice dig.
Gonna give this free version a try.
Some day, everything will be in the cloud and then “the cloud” will be as slow as the internet.
LOL
Seems to be a great monitoring company, I presently use the free service from Pingdom but if in future if I plan to switch I am surely going to give Monitis a shot.