Maintaining a website is not an easy feat and there are many factors that can lead to website downtime, including issues related to hosting services, broken links, certificate issues, DDoS attacks, data related issues, domain expiry, code issues, server issues, infrastructure related issues and many more. Website monitoring service provides alerts and recommend corrective actions to let you proactively look at any probable issues.
There are many website monitoring software providers out there in the wild that offer services like simple website url monitoring, downtime alerts via emails, SMS, Twitter, Slack, HipChat etc, transaction tracking, application performance management, real user tracking, server performance tracking and infrastructure tracking as well.
Most of the advanced website monitoring tools also offer mobile apps for tracking with push notifications, APIs access for developers to create custom monitoring solutions and many more features.
The most popular tools include Pingdom, Satuscake.com, Uptrends, Site24X7, Monitis, SmartBear – Alertsite, New Relic, Dynatrace and Appdynamics etc. that offer services for individual webmasters as well as SMBs and large enterprises.
Which is the Best Website Monitoring Service for You?
This question is for you and totally depends on the scale of your website, website audience, target business, whether it is an individual blog, an ecommerce store, a large online magazine, news website or an enterprise grade web applications. It also depends on the features that you are looking for and the overall budget that you can afford.
Talking about a very simple but powerful website monitoring service named Uptime Robot, you can get started with website monitoring in less than a minute. You register on their website, start of with free website monitoring service offering, configure website urls and you are all set.
Another simple website monitoring tool is updown.io. This is the best category for individual website owners, bloggers, small simple websites, or otherwise if your requirements are minimal irrespective of size of your website or web application.
There is another category of tools that includes PIngdom, Statuscake, Uptrends, Site 24X7 and Smartbear etc. that go a step beyond and not just keep track on the website uptime or downtime but also features like real user monitoring, pagespeed, DNS monitoring, FTP and other protocols, keywords analysis and many more features. These services fit best for website administrators who typically need to keep an eye on everything related to website uptime and performance etc.
The third category is the category of beasts that includes tools like New Relic, Dynatrace and AppDynamics etc. These tools go all guns to track not only uptime or performance but each and every aspect related to usability analysis and recommendations, user engagement analysis and improvement recommendations,, backend servers tracking, infrastructure, data analytics, trend analysis, root cause analysis and recommended actions, and many more features. These tools are a perfect for finding out areas to improve your online business or presence as a whole.
In this article we will cover the 10 best website monitoring software that are used by individual bloggers, website owners, startups, ecommerce stores, small scale businesses as well as web applications of large enterprises.
The scale and size of various free website monitoring services as well as paid services vary but the target remains the same – to keep a website or web application up and running, without any issues and with minimal downtime.
Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the most popular website monitoring service in the commercial space and offers many features like website uptime monitoring, real user monitoring, transaction monitoring, page speed monitoring, root cause analysis, API access and many more.
Pingdom services are used by more than 700K users and its customers include some of the big companies like Apple, Google, Pinterest, Dell, Amazon and HP.
There are Android and iOS apps available for Pingdom that can be used to monitor your websites while on the go. Pingdom also offers API support using which developers can access Pingdom features via API and automate tasks and interactions etc.
All the features that Pingdom offers might be an overkill for monitoring an individual website or a blog but there is a starter pricing plan that is specially designed for individuals with minimal requirements.
Other pricing plans include Standard, advanced, professional and enterprise, Enterprise being the top end plan for extensive application performance monitoring for large scale organizations.
Pingdom is cloud based solution and doesn’t need any installation or setup, you can start off with a 14 days trial of Pingdom before making a decision to buy the service.
Pingdom is based out of Sweden and came into existence back in 2007, Pingdom has more than 60 probe servers across Europe and Americas to ensure that website administrators are first to know about any issues with website uptime, email server, DNS and other server or infrastructure related issues.
Checkout official website of Pingdom here at – Pingdom
Statuscake.com
Statuscake.com is one of the best website monitoring service provider, Headquartered in London and founded back in 2012. Statuscake became very popular within few months of its release and as of today gives a very close competition to Pingdom in terms of features, support and pricing.
Like Pingdom, statuscake services are also used by thousands of users including big companies like Microsoft, Godaddy, Netflix, Symantec, NASA, Disney, Box and Thomas Cook.
Statuscake provides various options to send alerts on website downtime including SMS, push notifications for Android and iOS, alerts via emails, integrations with Slack, Zapier, PagerDuty and other 3rd party apps.
One area where statuscake beats the competition is its fantastic customer support service, they can be contacted 24/7 via Live Chat, Twitter, Facebook, emails and other plans for enterprises.
When it comes to pricing plans, there are multiple options to cater individual bloggers, small online stores as well as large scale organizations.
Statuscake website monitoring software here at – StatusCake Website Monitoring and Downtime Alerts
Uptrends
Uptrends offers multiple solutions including products for website tracking, web application monitoring, mobile site monitoring, web performance monitoring, multi browser monitoring, External server monitoring as well as internal server monitoring.
Uptrends was founded back in 2007 by Neils Brinkman and currently operates from 5 locations across United States, Netherlands, France and Germany. There are more than 10+ monitoring locations that keep track of websites and networks for downtime uptime and performance.
Uptrends also has its presence across big companies like NASA, Discovery channel, DHL, IBM, Lenovo and Shell.
Uptrends pricing plans fall across two categories, first one is basic monitoring that includes plans for individuals & startups, small and medium scale businesses and for large scale enterprises.
The second category presents more features and is useful for advanced monitoring and offers business and enterprise packages.
You can opt for Uptrends trial for free without the need to provide credit card details, Read more about Uptrends here at – Uptrends
Site24x7
Site 24X7 is another popular website monitoring service from the house of ZOHO corp that operates from North America, Europe and Asia. ZOHO Corp is leading software developer company and operating since 1996. Site 24X7 offers solutions for enterprises of all scale including some big names like Honda, Groupon, Cisco, VMWare and Godaddy.
Site 24X7’s range of products include Website Monitoring, Server Monitoring, Application Monitoring, Network Monitoring and Real User Monitoring. Focusing a bit more on web site monitoring, Key features that makes Site24X7 one of the best website monitoring tool are as listed below –
- Website performance monitoring
- Analysis of webpages
- HTTP and HTTPS availability monitoring for websites
- DNS monitoring for servers
- Monitoring mail servers
- User experience monitoring
- Monitoring FTP servers
- Certificates monitoring – SSL
- Internal network monitoring
- SMTP, TCP, POP, PING and TCP Port Monitoring
- Website uptime monitoring
- And many more…
Read more about Site24X7 external website monitoring service here at – Site24X7
AlertBot Website Monitoring
AlertBot is a top player in the industry that provides advanced website monitoring to continuously monitor critical websites and applications for errors and performance issues. They use real web browsers to do all their testing. AlertBot helps identify problem areas and bottlenecks on your site to improve the users’ experience.
They can monitor all sorts of areas on your website such as: Homepages, Login Areas, Signup Forms, Shopping Carts, Control Panels, File Downloads, APIs, etc. AlertBot also provides testing from locations around the world and can alert you via email, text, or phone call alerts when there is a problem.
Here are some of the things that stood out to us:
- Advanced Features & Ease of Use – AlertBot has a lot of advanced features that we really liked. Unlike a lot of other services, AlertBot has made their features very easy and intuitive to use.
- Proactive Script Assistance – We find with a lot of other services that setting up monitoring for things like login areas and shopping carts can be very complicated. One thing that stood out about AlertBot is that they do it for you. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to setup this advanced type of monitoring. In addition, they will watch over your scripts to ensure they are always working as expected in cases where things on your website may change.
- Time Saving Reports – AlertBot offers unique reports direct to your inbox that provide you with the most crucial and helpful information, so you don’t have to dig around for it. One report that really stood out was AlertBot’s HealthMap. I loved this report. Its performance sections are color coded, making it easy to quickly identify problems and take action.
Overall, AlertBot offers a great experience from start to finish and they have many satisfied customers like BlueCross BlueShield, Sony, Mutual of Omaha Insurance, Microsoft, and Disney.
AlertBot offer a free 2-week trial – http://www.AlertBot.com
Monitis/monitor.us
Monitis was founded back in 2006 and got a power up recently by its merger with monitor.us. Monitis is used by business executives, IT specialists and IT service providers of many companies across the globe.
Like many of its other competitors like Site24X7 and Pingdom, Monitis also offers many features when it comes to applications monitoring, including Real time user monitoring, Website downtime/uptime monitoring, Server monitoring, application performance monitoring, network monitoring, cloud monitoring, main servers monitoring and custom built monitoring solution by the use of open APIS.
Read more about Monitis web monitoring software here at – Monitis
SmartBear Alertsite
Alertsite was acquired by smartBear back in 2011 and offers synthetic user monitoring services for websites and web applications.
AlertSite is quite a simple website monitoring software to work with where you can either use URLs for overall uptime/downtime monitoring or define the transactions that you need to monitor and select the browsers (IE, Mozilla or Chrome) to simulate the transaction, along with defining the time, location and other details etc.
Synthetic monitoring emulates how a real user would behave but it doesn’t actually capture the actions of the real users, Pingdom, Monitis, Appdynamics and Dynatrace are the services that offer features to capture real user behavior but SmartBear AlertSite is not into that.
Alertsite is one of the most comprehensive solutions for monitoring APIs, web and mobile application performance. Some of the key features that makes Alertsite compete among the top website monitoring tools include monitoring native mobile apps with actual devices, nodes and network speeds for 3G, 4GLTE, 4G networks, monitoring of multi step transactions and business processes, monitoring options over the internet as well as behind the firewalls, option to reuse existing Selenium scripts, over more than 300 monitoring nodes, good check on false positives and many more.
Site I easily categorize Alertsite among the best website monitoring service providers for the reason that it already serves more than 1000 companies with some of the key happy customers including Payless, Hilton, Domino’s, StubHub and JetBlue Airways.
Check out all the features of Alertsite here at – Alertsite Website Uptime
New Relic
New Relic is a different animal altogether in the wild of application performance management. New Relic offers a complete stack for application performance monitoring and web monitoring is just a part of the game.
New Relic is a name to reckon with in this space but than it comes with a price tag which is bigger than the likes of PIndom, Uptrends, Statuscake.com and Monitis etc.
New Relic is not the only one of the giant stature that ranks as best website monitoring tool, other two big players include Dynatrace and Appdynamics, covered in the next few sections of this article.
Read more about New Relic here at – New Relic
Appdynamics
Appdynamics is the leader in website monitoring software and application performance management space and offers services in four main areas that include Application performance management, end user monitoring, application analytics and infrastructure visibility.
Apart from these four Appdynamics also released a new service marketed as Recently they have launched a new service called Business IQ. With business IQ, Appdynamics attempts to draw relationship between application performance and business outcomes.
AppDynamics was launched back in 2008 as a tool for application performance tracking and infrastructure monitoring. It evolved into a comprehensive enterprise grade monitoring platform over the period of time and as of today is used by companies like Nasdaq, Tesco, UBS, ExactTarget and DIRECTV etc.
Read more about Appdynamics here at – Appdynamics
Uptime robot – Free Website Monitoring
Uptime robot is one of the most simple yet powerful website monitoring software out there in the market. The main focus of the tool is the to keep track of the website downtime and you can get started in less a minute.
Launched back in 2010, Uptime Robot also happens to be the only sophisticated website monitoring software that is completely free to use for anyone and everyone, they do have a pro plan that offers more
The key monitoring offered by Uptime Robot includes –
HTTP Monitoring – It can not get simpler than this, Uptime Robot service keeps on sending http requests to the websites or the urls that you want to monitor and based on the response code (200 or 404) it keeps you alert on whether the website/URL is down or not.
Port – Port checking is mostly used for tracking status of services like DNS, POP and SMTP.
Read more about UptimeRobot here at – UptimeRobot Free Website Monitoring
Dynatrace
Dynatrace is another company that offers products and services for SMBs and Enterprises, it completes with the likes of Appdynamics and New Relic. Dynatrace website monitoring is much powerful in the areas of user experience monitoring, dynamic and interactive dashboards and user transactions monitoring and analytics.
Dynatrace offers a complete range of services that can be used to monitor mobile apps, browsers, applications, code, network, logs, databases, synthetic monitoring, mainframe, cloud service, servers and app containers.
Read more about Dynatrace here at – Dynatrace
Few other simple and best website monitoring tools worth looking at –
Updown.io
Looking for a simple service to just check if your website is up and running? It can not be simpler than updown.io, the service sends a an http head request to your site url or urls and notifies you about the status.
Updown.io may not be the best website monitoring tool for enterprises but it is easy and simple to you and a great option for those who have minimal requirements. Once you register, it adds credits in your account for free website monitoring for a while.
Check out Updown.io here at – Updown.io
Alertra Site Monitoring
Alertra was established back in 2000 and has customer base mainly in United States, United Kingdom and in many other countries.
When it comes to monitoring any device which is connected to the internet, Alertra is a good option for timely notifications and reporting. It is supported by a global network of independent nodes and offers notification by emails, SMS and phone calls.
Check out Alertra here at – Alertra Site Monitoring
SEO Monitoring
SEO monitoring is essential for the careful monitoring of website changes. This is one of the essential aspects of SEO as it can help in boosting the quality and the output of the SEO efforts. One of the main things that you can do with this feature is checking the indexing issues on the key landings.
The landing pages are commonly classified according to their importance, and certain landing sites are regarded as more important compared to others. If your page is somehow not indexed in the robots.txt or the meta tags, you can receive notifications through your email. You can also get further notifications when any changes are made in the HTTP status code.
There are also many other benefits that you can reap from this feature. For instance, you can track the changes made in the content strategies by your competitors. Monitoring the accessibility of your website and preventing hackers’ activities also becomes a lot easy when you use the site checker.
Read more about Sitechecker website SEO monitoring service here at – Sitechecker
Conclusion
The market is highly competitive with little or no margin for error in the hands of businesses. Websites and mobile apps are the key platforms to present any product or service in front of potential customers.
Slow load times, non responsive web pages or a complete downtime of your website can potentially result in permanent loss of customers. The modern age consumers have no patience and leaves your website just because of a webpage would load with 1 second delay.
Even if your website or app is up and running with lightning speed, it may still not get desired conversions due to bad user experience and many other factors. Some of the powerful website monitoring service providers offer features that help you track user interactions and recommend corrective actions.
In short, it is not just about website uptime and speed, it is much more than that and selection of right kind of website monitoring tool can greatly influence success of your online business. Tools like Pingdom, Uptrends, New Relic and others mentioned in this article have proven track record with success stories from top notch companies.
Share your experience with website tracking and monitoring with our readers, via comments. Cheers!
