So far Pingdom is the only uptime checker that I use because the free account comes with a lot of features except with the limitation of only checking one website. I don’t have a problem with that since I only have one website to monitor. The feature which I think is most important in an uptime checking service is the 1 minute interval check because if Pingdom fails to connect to my website for 5 times consecutively, that means the website is probably totally inaccessible and I should definitely check on the problem as soon as possible.
Recently I read from Labnol.org that Amit has developed a very useful script that is able to check a website to see if it is up or down. The script runs on Google Docs which means anyone with a Google account is able to use it. The best part is it can even be configured to check on the website every minute and notifies you immediately via email if the script detected that your website is down and then notifies you when the website is back up again.
The setting up process is fairly easy and anyone should be able to do it without problems. Just login to your Google account, make a copy of the Google Docs sheet, enter website to check and email to receive notification and setup a time-driven trigger. See the detailed steps here. Basically the script checks for HTTP OK Response Code Header which is 200 when accessing the website. To test if the script works or not, try entering a non existent URL such as http://www.labnol.org/testtest and you should receive an email notification and also see that the downtime details being logged in the Google Docs sheet itself.
The Is My Website Down script by Amit is very creative but Pingdom still takes the lead because their robots can crawl the webpage to check for certain keywords on the monitored webpage, alerting when down for X times in a row (to reduce false positives), and sending notifications to multiple contacts via email, sms, twitter, iphone and android. Moreover the free Pingdom account comes with 20 SMS alerts without charges.
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