For some websites uptime monitoring is not enough. What’s worth a website that is online, but its forms don’t work?

Our website monitoring service has just been enhanced to enable customers test their online forms. The system is now able to fill in the form, press the submit button and confirm the result (if it matches a pre-defined text fragment).
It can even log in with a given username and password!

You can test the new feature by signing up for the free trial account here.

We have introduced three new features:

1. The website is online during all the trial period? No problem, trial account users can now simulate the outage by simply clicking a button.

2. Checking the server response is not enough? Our system can now confirm if your website HTML is fully loaded by checking the presence of the "</html>" tag.

3. Changed the URL of your website? Or decided to use the service to monitor a different website? You can now modify the URL and decide whether to purge the historical data or not.

More to come soon.

We have added a dictionary to our website – to explain all the terms used on our pages that could confuse users.

It can be found here.

The first version of the dictionary covers the following terms: Alert, Database server, Downtime, Googlebot, Impression, Mail server, Monitor, Page, PageRank, RSS, Server, SLA, SMS, Uptime, URL, Web application, Web server, Website traffic.

Have you been wondering why website-monitoring.com plugins for WordPress and Joomla! have beed published so quickly and Drupal plugin is still missing?

The truth is we have created the Drupal plugin in April. It has been submitted to the drupal.org portal for approval and… we had to wait 4 months for the feedback!

We need to fix the code here and there and then apply for another review. We hope we won’t have to wait another 4 months…

On April, 2010 we have started to monitor two of the most popular shared hosting providers – HostGator and HostMonster. Now we are able to publish their uptime for the last 30, 90 and 180 days.

Important: we don’t monitor their official websites, as they use special-priority servers. Instead, we’ve been monitoring test websites installed on their servers used to provide hosting services.

The idea was to help customers make their choice by comparing the quality of hosting providers services.

We hope that more ISPs decide to join us and appear in the table.

Today we have changed our mobile service provider. With the new partner we are able to deliver our SMS alerts instantly to almost every cellphone in the world.

See the coverage

We have just published a plugin for Joomla! enabling its users to have website-monitoring.com service history (tables & charts) displayed in their Joomla! administration panels.

Read more

We have prepared a WordPress plugin that integrates website-monitoring.com user panel with WordPress.
If you are using WP as your CMS, just install the plugin in 3 easy steps and forget about the separate interface. All your uptime history (charts & tables) will become available to you in your WP panel.

Read more

Perhaps you are not aware of it, but there are plenty of places where you can get a totally free website monitoring service for your website.
Of course you can google the “free website monitoring” keyword and check site by site, but… don’t. We did it for you.

In the first place we have excluded all the “free trial” options. They are free, but only for a limited time – usually 7 to 30 days. Afterwards you need to pay or resign.
Then we have visited tens of websites offering a real free and time-unlimited service of website availability monitoring. We have chosen twelve of them – that seemed working and reliable. There are some slightly differences among them, but the only important feature that lets compare them is the frequency of the tests.
While commercial monitoring services offer intervals down to 1 minute, free ones check your website every 5-60 minutes.
(60 minute interval has no sense at all. Imagine server administrator that wouldn’t notice and fix the failure in 1 hour…).

OK, here is the list with links. The choice is – as always – yours.

If you need a professional 1-minute monitoring service, check the “15 website monitoring services compared” article.

We have compared 15 most popular monitoring service providers – from a point of view of a webmaster looking for a simple availability service for one website.

Our observations:

• Most of the providers don’t offer 1 minute monitoring. The ones that do, usually charge a lot for it.
• Almost every profider enables customers to try the service with 14- or 30-day free trial period.
• All the providers send email alerts, most of them SMS alerts, only a few generate RSS feed with notifications.
• The number of monitoring servers vary from 1 up to 37. Although 3-4 are perfectly enough.

Here is a detailed table with all the information we have gathered from provider’s websites. We hope it will help you make the proper choice.

*via email – email notifications sent to chosen USA cell network operators’ gateways. No actual SMS notifications.