The whole point of a web site is that people can see it. Web site availability monitoring checks your site as often as every minute and notifies you right away if your site is not available.
No technology is perfect. Your web site will go down at some point. You don't want to hear about it first from customer complaints, or worse yet have customers wander off without letting you know. NodePing's web site availability monitoring will let you know very quickly if your site is down. NodePing's normal subscriptions include unlimited notifications, so you don't have to worry about whether you going to run out. We can notify you within moments by email, SMS, twitter, or voice calls if your site goes down.
Many of NodePing's customers are Internet service providers or computer consulting firms and need our advanced features like the API, branding, and subaccounts. At the same time, we've worked hard to keep our service as simple as possible to use, so that businesses can use it easily even if they are not computer professionals. After all, just about every company needs a reliable web presence, but not every company on the web is made up of programmers. Sign up, and we'll have your results from your monitors ready within minutes.
People are impatient. They won't wait for a site that takes too long to respond. You put considerable effort into making sure your website is responsive when you build it. Our monitoring keeps track of how it responds over time, so you can spot trends or problems.
Some services show you the time to load and render the page. That's important when you're building your site, but it isn't what you need from availability monitoring. Availability monitoring needs to show you how well the server and infrastructure are responding. This is important if you manage your own web servers, so you can watch for logging or other system processes that interfere with how the site performs. It is also important if you are on a shared host, and NodePing's monitoring data can be useful in discussing problems with your hosting provider.
Have you ever visited a web site and had some part of the page (maybe a list of articles or posts, for example), show "Database error" instead of the list of articles? Some monitoring services check the initial response, but not the content. It is a good idea to watch for specific content in your pages. NodePing's HTTP Content check watches for specific content inside a web page, and notifies you if it is missing, or if unwanted content appears. For example, you can watch for specific database errors that might occur on your site.
One of the motivating factors that sparked the initial launch of NodePing was the realization that many sites don't get monitored for the simple reason that it costs too much. Our goal from the start has been to leverage new technologies to keep our costs down and pass the savings on to our customers, without compromising on reliability.
NodePing's monitoring services can monitor a lot more than web sites. We also have monitoring for DNS, SMTP, FTP, SSL certificates, SSH, ping, MySQL, and more.