Be THE first to know when your own servers have problems

This is perhaps the most precise and direct way I could start with Pingdom. Pingdom monitors your website and servers and lets you know as soon as there is a problem. Its simply a website monitoring service. It is inexpensive and straightforward to set up. Pingdom offers continuous monitoring of the availability of your online services, notification of failures, service resumption, disruptions and analytics for availability data. Notifications can be via email and even SMS too.

How to Start

To start monitoring your website, you need to add a check. The user interface is easy to use and understand.

The check resolution means how often the check test your website. The lowest is 1 minute, means check your site every minute. Beside normal web checks, Pingdom also support advance network checks and email checks.

For check notification, you can be notified by email or SMS. You can also control the frequency of notification.

Pingdom Monitoring Criteria

You can access and configure your account through Pingdom’s Pingdom Panel. You can monitor your website’s performance, view visual reports and graphs about your uptime and response time, and access downtime logs.

Check Frequency: Pingdom supports time resolutions of 1, 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minute for checks. As with all monitoring services,

Monitoring Criteria

Notification Methods: Email • SMS (Mobile Phone)
Notification Events: Up Alert • Down Alert • Repeated Down Alert
Notification Contacts: Multiple Contacts
Summary Report Types: Online Graphical Reports • Online Summary Reports
Multiple Monitoring Points: Yes
Number of Monitoring Points: 11 to 24
Services Monitored: HTTP Sensor • TCP Sensor • Ping Sensor • UDP Sensor
Languages Available: English
Uptime Buttons: No

Pingdom Report Analysis

Let us look at one of the reports from Pingdom on Bursa Malaysia website.

The above picture shows you how stable is a website/server. As you see, the red color means website/server downtime more than an hour.

The above pic is of response time. You will ask why is it needed. Sometimes, even your web server is up but your website might still not be accessible because the server is too busy to response. Therefore, Pingdom report also shows response time performance of your site. The site has a response time of 8 milisecond. Ideally it should be 1 ms or close to that.

If you don't like graphs then there is a tabular format also which shows detail average response time, uptime and downtime period. Clicking the downtime period shows the details of the downtime.

Note: You can even publish your reports publicly if you wish to notify your users how well you are doing.

Pingdom Plans and Price

Pingdom’s basic plan costs $9.95 per month, and serves 5 monthly checks with 20 included SMS alerts. Uptime can be checked routinely for HTTP/HTTPS, Ping, TCP/UDP, DNS and POP3/IMAP/SMTP. For automatic downtime notification, you get to specify if you wish to receive alerts through email or SMS. At any time you choose, you can obtain detailed reports for uptime, response time, error logs, and public reports. If you are not sure then you can always signup for Pingdom 30-day free trial to get a feel of it.

You can get more about it from their packages information

Support and Quality

Pingdom, though inexpensive, makes no compromise on the quality assurance and support issues. Highly dedicated technical stuffs are there and its constantly improving. I don't have any biasness over them whatsoever. But that shouldn't refrain me to appreciate what is to be. Just in case you are in doubts, read the next segment.

Who All Are with Pingdom

Pingdom was founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Sam Nurmi in Sweden. Ever since, they’ve been providing uptime monitoring services for customers in 127 countries. One of the biggest enterprises of its kind, Pingdom has earned the patronage of companies in the likes of Alexa.com, FeedBurner, Foot Locker, Mosso, iStockPhoto and Canonical. Here is a note from Microsoft Technet Magazine

Pingdom.com, an application service provider (ASP), provides a simple-yet-effective automated monitoring service. The ASP’s servers are distributed across multiple global locations, giving you a much better sense of what your users are really experiencing—as opposed to relying on a single-source external service monitor.

Conclusion

Though Pingdom is really inexpensive for business users, for a personal user like me, I still find it a bit on the higher side. Not something worth complaining but I feel the pinch however. If you are single user looking for a preliminary service, I will suggest you to give a shot to internetuptimemonitor though it just is too restricted. For every responsible webmaster and admins, I will recommend you try Pingdom once and then decide by yourself.

[Thanks: Pingdom, centernetworks.com, joomlahostingreviews.com, liewcf.com ]