Although many of these charge a fee there are also several free options available – ideal for what we are discussing here.

FreeWebMonitoring.com will alert you via email as soon as a site goes down, as will UptimeAlert.com and both are free services. SiteUptime.com offer both free and paid options, and the free service is fine if you only wish to monitor one URL. If you like the idea of receiving an SMS message as soon as your site is offline, as well as email notifications the free service offered by the free website monitoring service at ezinedesigner.com.

There are plenty of paid services that offer far more comprehensive features and stats, but, if you are only wishing to monitor the performance of someone else’s site to test the reliability of their web host, free is probably more sensible. As for your own sites, well, you might consider a paid service’s features important enough to consider.

All you need to establish is who is hosting with whom and then monitor the relevant domain. If you read any of the hosting forums it should be simple enough to find your testing material!

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