Tech Question: Website Monitoring

Hope everyone had a great weekend!! Is Tuesday too late to ask about people’s weekend? =) We hosted my aunt and uncle from Toronto for a few days — we hadn’t seen them in more than 5 years, so I put down the computers and enjoyed a little break to spend some quality time with them. It was a great time, and I’m sure we’ll blog some photos before too long on Addie & Storie’s blog.

Hey, I have a quick question to put out there to see if I can get any recommendations from any of you. Our current website host has been having some reliability/downtime issues. Another photographer (thanks, Joy!) let us know this morning that it appeared to be down again, and sure enough our host had made a change and crashed our website. Argh! This is happening way too often for my peace of mind (5 times this year so far!).

So, two things.

1. Please let me know if you ever see our site down! I’d be really grateful. It’s not hard to get back up if I just call them and let them know that they must have made some critical error recently. But if we don’t hear or know that it’s down, it’s possible it could stay that way for a few hours and that’s not good. Not good at all… Which brings me to my 2nd point/question,

2. Do you know of a good way to monitor a site and receive notifications of downtime/inaccessibility? There seem to be a plethora of programs out there offering site monitoring for a fee, so any recommendations to help narrow them down would be appreciated!

Happy Tuesday!

** EDITED 8/1/08 **

Okay, I found a couple of solutions! Hyperspin.com is now checking my site and sending me free reports, plus I found a Shareware program called “The Informant” which will monitor several sites for me as well, but only runs on my computer, whenever I’m online. So, between the two, I think we’re covered for now. 100% uptime reported for the last couple of days, which is a relief.

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