An important aspect of running a website is to make sure it’s up and running 24/7, and a great tool to use for that is website monitoring service. Right now, I’m on a personal JetPack plan, and JetPack regularly checks if my site is online. If it’s not, I get an e-mail. This works quite wll, and has proved to be handy at times. But since I’m in the process of moving away from WordPress, I won’t be renewing my JetPack subscription when it expires.

That means I need to find another website monitoring service. Thankfully there isn’t a lack of them out there on the vast collection of tubes we call The Internet. On one of my adventures on the World Wide Web, I came across the fine site of one Ahmad Al Maaz. In a post aptly titled “Best Free Pingdom Alternatives”, he describes two free website monitoring services, UptimeRobot and Freshping.

I thought that only two services was perhaps too few to choose from, so I went ahead and dug up two more, StatusCake and Better Uptime. All these four services have a wide range of features, but I only need them to do exactly what JetPack does today: Check that my website is online at regular intervals and send me an e-mail if it’s not. That very limited functionality is supported by the free tiers provided by all four services.

Free Website Monitoring Services Features

Better Uptime plays itself out of the game immediately by requiring that you to provide a phone number when you sign up, even if you don’t play to use their free phone call notification feature.

Better Uptime, I laugh at you and your blatant phone number harvesting!

Out of the remaining three, Freshping certainly seems like the most favorable choice. The number of monitoring locations is a bit low compared to the other two, but a check interval of 1 minute is tempting. The Freshping user interface also looks really nice. So I think I’ll give Freshping a try.

But do you known what’s better than using a website monitoring service? It’s using two services! And you know what’s better than using two? It’s using three, of course! Since I really, really want to know if my site is down, I’ll sign up for Freshping, UptimeRobot and StatusCake (despite their lame name).

That will give me the opportunity to see how all three services work when my site actually goes down. Two services would probably suffice, which means I can close my account on the one I prefer the least.

Good times all around!