When a web project is taken on, with some variation, the following process begins:
- Scoping
- Planning
- Design
- Build/Development
- Support & Training
All are necessary steps of a successful web project.
Assuming these are done well, and you now have a beautiful website that your company and your clients LOVE. So what now?
Serious about engagement, search rankings, and customer service? The next step is site uptime monitoring.
There are choices galore when it comes to uptime monitoring. Here’s a few we’ve used and use, and some pros and cons.
Uptime Monitoring Tools
Uptime Robot is an established player in the uptime monitoring space positioned somewhere between the hobbyist up to small and medium business monitoring. The basic tier is free, and offers reliable uptime monitoring with 5 minute intervals. Warning delivery methods come in the form of SMS messages and emails.
Pingdom is a strong service with a lot of available tools. They offer both iOS and Android apps, and a page speed tool with tailored recommendations to increase your site’s speed.
ManageWP is wonderful if you do the majority of your development in WordPress. In addition to uptime monitoring, it handles site backups and updates either automatically or manually. I found the uptime alerts to be reliable, but not as lightning fast as others. There are apps for iOS and Android. In my experience, the iOS is a little buggy, and crashes occasionally, but does show the stats that you need.
Happy Apps is an app I recently discovered when I was scanning through the iOS app store looking for uptime monitors that had Apple Watch compatibility.
If something goes down, I want to know whether I’m in an appropriate phone situation or not. It also monitors web apps, mobile apps, and has a lot of flexibility well beyond standard website monitoring. Currently we’re running Happy Apps runs as a trusted secondary uptime monitor.
And now for the winner. We started using Vigil for our primary site uptime monitoring over the last 6 months. Wins: Fastest notifications by a mile. Great iOS app that supports the Apple Watch. You can ping a site and do manual checks from the iPhone or Watch app. The thought that went into keeping the UX and UI simple really show in how well it works and how intuitive it is.
How do you monitor your site uptime? We always seek out the best and brightest tools, and welcome suggestions.
