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November 13, 2009

Pingdom – Easy Website Monitoring

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Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service that tracks the performance of your websites and alerts you when they’re down. Day and night, Pingdom will act as an internet watchdog by keeping an eye on your websites—both public and password-protected—FTP servers, and email servers, and notifying you via email, SMS, or Twitter when they have stopped working. Not only that, but the service keeps a record of these detected errors for the lifetime of your account, giving you the ability to view detailed reports about website downtime, response time and load time in an instant.

Get started with Pingdom by signing up for an account, inputting your website information and identifying how frequently you’d like Pingdom to check in on the status of your site. Select your preferred notification method, and then take a look at your first Pingdom report with uptime, response time, and performance test statistics. Once your Pingdom account has been set up, you can sit back and relax knowing your website’s performance is being monitored at all times. Not only will the service send you email or SMS alerts when your site is having issues, but it will also send daily, weekly, or monthly site performance statistics to your email account as well.

View your alert history in an instant on Pingdom’s control panel, and even make your uptime statistics available to readers with the use of a public report page. Not only do Pingdom’s reports list when a problem was detected, but they also detail the type of error, how long it lasted, and what could have triggered it, as well. In addition, Pingdom performs error analysis tests during every website outage, including checking the traceroutes,DNS lookups, and header response from the server—all in an effort to help you pinpoint what may have gone wrong. Pingdom’s excellent service and customer support make it a fantastic option for anyone looking for a better way to track the performance of their websites.

Practical Uses:

  • Find out instantly when your server is having problems
  • Keep customers informed on the website’s status with a public report page
  • Receive alerts via text message to stay informed when you’re not at home
  • Keep track of the performance of your site over a long period of time

Insider Tips:

  • Adjust the frequency of Pingdom’s status checks for a clearer view of your site’s issues
  • Sign up for Twitter alerts when your site goes down
  • Monitor the performance of email, DNS, and FTP servers in addition to your websites
  • View uptime reports in a chart or table format to spot trends easily

What we liked:

  • Service disruption notifications can be sent via email, SMS, or Twitter
  • Straightforward design makes setup easy
  • Free account option for basic users
  • iPhone application allows you to view the status of your website or server from anywhere

What we didn’t like:

  • Nothing

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: 2005
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: Sweden
  • Founded by: Sam Nurmi
  • Web site: http://pingdom.com

Costs:

  • Free account to monitor one website
  • Basic account monitors up to five websites, $9.95 per month
  • Business account monitors up to 30 websites, $39.95 per month

Comments

  1. Thanks for the mentioned.. I would also like to suggest http://100pulse.com – A Free Website Monitoring service, that monitors website’s availability, monitors, DNS servers, Ports… Gives you instant alerts via Email, SMS, RSS Feed and google gadget..

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