How To Be Notified If Your Website Is Down via Email or Text Message
April 9th, 2012This morning I woke up and checked my email via my iPhone. I noticed an email from my website traffic tracking company Web-Stat that my website was unavailable (meaning it was down). Normally when I get these messages, there is another one from Web-Stat saying the website was up again. Usually they are spread apart by 15 minutes or so. But this time, the original “your website is down message was an hour earlier, with no accompanying “your website is back up”. Something was wrong.
I went to check my website, and sure enough it was down. So I immediately went into my website hosting company’s control panel and submitted a support ticket saying my website was down.
It’s wonderful that Web-Stat has this built-in site monitoring feature. I began to wonder though, what if Web-Stat had the ability to send me a text message when the website went down – that way, I could have been notified immediately, versus when I happened to check my email.
The answer is yes. Web-Stat has a text notification service. It costs $0.50 (fifty cents) per message sent out, and you buy credits in advance. If you have a Web-Stat account, login and go into the control panel area. Then click on “Watch Dog Settings”. You will see the email alert fields (which are available at no additional costs) but you will also see a section below called Cell Phone Credits!
So now, whenever my website is down, I will get a text message and immediately be able to contact my hosting company that my site is down and to hurry up and fix it. I love Web-Stat!
If you want to be notified that your website is down via email or text – in addition to getting really excellent website traffic tracking services – my recommendation is Web-Stat. Just click on the name and you can get a free 30 day trial.
Keep tracking those websites! A $0.50 text could be the difference between getting a new client and missing that client because your website was down.
Jill--------------
J. Olkoski
Aldebaran Web Design, Seattle
Jill Olkoski has a BS in Engineering, a BS in Computer Science and an MA in Clinical Psychology. She delights in using her advanced technical and psychological skills to help small business owners develop cost-effective and successful websites.
June 18th, 2013 at 7:59 pm
Thanks for telling us about Web-Stat!
I found a free alternative called Content Site Monitor (http://www.contentsitemonitor.com). It has a really simple and cool web interface that allows you to view your site’s up-time statistics on a desktop or mobile screen. It’s easy to configure your monitoring parameters as well.
It doesn’t just ping your server to make sure that it’s alive. It allows you to specify certain content/keywords that you want to monitor. It will send you alert email if the content/keywords are missing from your site or if your site goes down. You can just set it and forget it. Best of all, it’s free to monitor up to 3 sites!
You can set it up to SMS the alert message to your phone by using each carrier specific SMS email address (http://www.emailtextmessages.com). For example, for AT&T, you use xxxxxxxxxx@txt.att.net, for T-Mobile, you use xxxxxxxxxx@tmomail.net, etc. It does not cost you anything to send the SMS. However, it might cost you to receive it though.