Get an alert by email or SMS when your website goes down

SiteUptime offer a service which tracks the availability of a website and sends an email when a website is down, which will happen to you from time to time, no matter how much uptime your web host boasts about.

There are three levels of service available, the base package is free and allows you to monitor one website. If your website goes down, SiteUptime will send an email to your nominated email address (which can be different to the one you register with) alerting you of the situation. The nominated site is tested at regular intervals specified by you, the current options for the free account are every 30 or 60 minutes. It is possible to receive an email telling you the site is okay, but I would imagine you would soon get tired of receiving those. One thing to note – do not use an email address for the alerts from the domain name you are testing as you may not receive it due to the site being down!

If you wish to monitor more than one website there are two further packages available; the Premium Plan and the Advanced Plan at $5.00 and $10.00 per month respectively (if you pay annually it will cost a little less than paying monthly, $48 and $96).

The Premium Package monitors three websites while the Advanced package monitors six websites and the test is run every five or fifteen minutes. The Advanced package allows you to receive SMS alerts at a cost of .20 (cents) each.

With each of these packages you can have the alerts sent to multiple email addresses. A handy feature if you do not spend a lot of time at your computer or do not have permanent access to your email account via a portable device.

If you run more than six websites and would like to track them all, there is an additional option available which enables you to track more domains at a cost of $2.00 per domain per month.

Not bad value if you are making a living through your website and rely on it being available at all times.

UPDATE : As I wanted to test the service, I initially I set it up so I would receive an email every 30 minutes. So far I have only received one email advising me the site I am monitoring is okay and none advising me the site is down. My SiteUptime account says the last check was Oct 9, 2008 05:43 AM, it follows that an email should have been sent at that time, but I have not received it.

Here is the published version of the reults so far.