Nowadays, any company’s website resembles the top performing sales rep, reputation sheet and primary revenue driver in every industry. Whether you’re a SaaS business or an e-commerce site, taking all the measures against website downtime is paramount. Each second of downtime can potentially impact your company severely, leading to lost sales opportunities, dissatisfied customers and a poor first impression, and eventually affect customer loyalty and overall reputation.
To give you an idea, in 2013, Amazon’s servers went down for 40 minutes. According to estimates made by industry experts, those 40 minutes cost the retail giant almost $5 million. A recent research by IDC – leading marketing intelligence provider for consumer and information technology markets – revealed that the average cost of unplanned annual app downtime equals $1.2 to 2.5 billion.
As a CDN provider, we know the consequences of website downtime and take it very seriously, and that’s why we have comprised this list of top 10 website monitoring tools that will help you stay on top of your website’s uptime and make sure you’re running 24/7, without any glitches.
1. Pingdom
Pingdom is probably the most famous and reliant website monitoring tool on the market. Throughout its long history of delivering outstanding monitoring services with precise alerts, the company has served Google, Amazon, HP, Dell and many others notable businesses.
The vendor features over 60 monitoring locations spread all over the globe. The uptime checks are performed every minute and the system guarantees no false positives thanks to multiple checks. Apart from website monitoring, the vendor also offers page speed monitoring, real user monitoring and synthetic interaction testing.
The pricing plans start at $9.95/monthly which includes 10 uptime checks, 1 transaction and page speed monitoring test and 100k/monthly page view insights from website visitors.
2. Webpagetest
Webpagetest is a simple, free, yet powerful website monitoring software designed to help users run various speed tests from multiple locations around the globe at real customer connection speeds via Internet Explorer and Google Chrome browsers. The tool allows running both simple tests to understand page loading speed and advanced tests including multi-step transactions, video captures, content blocking and much more.
The test results provide a ton of diagnostic data in the form of resource loading waterfall charts, page speed optimization checks as well as ideas for improvements. Also, there is no need to create an account. To start your test, simply go to webpagetest.org, input your parameters and study the results.
3. Gtmetrix
GTmetrix is a website performance measuring and monitoring tool, which can be used to gather actionable insights on how fast your pages load and what you can do to improve this metric. Key features include Google PageSpeed and YSlow scores and recommendations, page loading details – page load time, total page size and the total number of requests – as well as waterfall charts, video analysis and the historical performance of your website.
The software features close to 30 monitoring locations spread across 7 regions including Canada, UK, Australia, USA, India, Brazil and China. The tool is also equipped with mobile optimization, which is done by passing the URL through an actual Android device to get real-world performance data on your page load speeds.
The pricing plans start at $14.95/monthly which includes 10 URLs to monitor, 100 daily API access for applications, unlimited report filters as well as access to most reporting features. There is also a free plan available offering up to 3 URL monitoring, 20 daily API access for apps, but no reporting whatsoever.
4. Updown
Updown is a great, affordable and simple tool designed to check a website’s status by periodically – you get to set the period yourself – sending HTTP HEAD request to a URL of your choice. Once set up, the tool will automatically perform the action continuously and notify you by email or text whenever an issue occurs (website doesn’t respond, website crashed, etc.).
The pricing is very flexible and depends on the number of websites you want to monitor and the frequency of sending HTTP HEAD request. For instance, monitoring two websites every 30 seconds will cost only around $3/monthly.
The vendor currently operates 4 monitoring nodes located in San Francisco, Montreal, Gravelines and Singapore.
5. Monitority
Monitority is a really simple, yet effective tool. It features monitoring of domains, URLs and IP addresses – both HTTP and HTTPS – all completely free. Moreover, there is no limit on the number of checks you can perform, nor there is one of the number of URLs. The tool notifies you via email, text messages and/or Twitter whenever there is an issue with your URL or IP address, and the software has nodes all over the globe. A slight downside is that the checking intervals are fixed at 1 minute, but that’s still a ton of value you’re getting for free.
6. Host Tracker
Host Tracker is a seasoned industry player that has been providing reliable website monitoring services for more than a decade. Some of their clients include Microsoft, Kaspersky and Panasonic.
While the tool is a bit costly – to access 1-minute interval checks and HTTPS support, you’ll have to play at least $29/monthly – it does offer a powerful set of website monitoring, tracking and alerting features. Host Tracker supports close to every protocol including HTTP/HTTPS, Ping, Port, MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL, FTP and SSH, has over 80 monitoring nods spread around the globe and sends alerts by text, email or voice mail.
7. StatusCake
StatusCake is one of the most reliable and accurate website monitoring tools that is trusted by companies like Netflix, Go Daddy, Google and EA. Two of their main strengths are never having false positives and the ability to offer constant check intervals. Also, the tool offers a lot more than just website uptime monitoring. For instance, the premium plans offer additional services like SSL monitoring, virus checking, domain expiration and page speed monitoring and various browser testing capabilities. They also have a long list of available app integrations to receive notifications with including Slack, Zapier, etc.
The tool features over 60 monitoring locations worldwide with unlimited alerts across all plans. The free plan offers 10 uptime tests with 5-minute intervals while the paid plans start at $24.49/monthly.
8. Monitis
Monitis is an all-in-one, cloud-based website monitoring platform designed to help clients keep track of their websites, networks, cloud servers and applications anytime, from anywhere in the world. All of the features are available under a single, user-friendly dashboard, allowing even non-tech savvy users to take full advantage of the technology.
The vendor operates over 30 monitoring locations around the globe and offers 1-minute interval checks and 2 years of historical archive. Supported protocols include HTTP, HTTPS, PING, DNS, TCP, UDP, ICMP, SMTP and POP3.
The pricing is highly flexible, allowing users to custom build their plan, depending on the number of monitoring nods and uptime monitors required. The tool is also available for a test drive for 15 days, with all of the features enabled. For instance, 2 monitors tested every minute from 4 different locations will cost around $3/monthly.
9. Pingometer
Pingometer is a popular website monitoring tool that features over 12 monitoring locations spread across the US, South Africa, Europe and Eastern Asia. The checking intervals vary from 1 to 30 minutes and supported protocols include HTTP, HTTPS, RUM, DNS, ICMP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, TCP, UDP and API. The software is equipped with multiple checks system which guarantees no false positives and offers group and individual alerts via email, text messages, phone calls or Tweets with intelligent scheduling.
The pricing plans start at $9/monthly with 5 monitors from 3 locations and are designed for a single group or contact in terms of alerts.
10. Site24x7
Site24x7 is one of the oldest and most experienced website, server and application monitoring services provider on the market. It is currently owned and operated by Zoho and has been used by a number of big brands including Harley-Davidson, Cisco, Honda and Go Daddy.
The software features over 50 monitoring locations worldwide and the supported protocols include HTTP, HTTPS, REST API, DNS, Ping, TCP, FTP, POP, IMAP, and SMTP. The intervals between checks are 1 minute for all pricing plans and there is guaranteed false alert protection due to multiple location rechecks.
The pricing plans start at $9/monthly and include 10 website/server uptime checks, 1 synthetic web transaction and 50 text message/voice alert credits.