Commercial and Hosted Web Monitoring Systems

All of these sites seem to be doing business as of December, 2004. They are all commercially-driven in one way or another, which makes sense given that they actually have to use their own bandwidth and servers to provide the information we all want from a monitoring package.   Hopefully we'll have a chance to try most or all of them out, and get some feedback on what works, and what doesn't.

            http://www.dotcom-monitor.com

• Accessibility check: Is the site reachable.

• Performance check:  Does the site respond within a user-specified amount of time.

• Content check:  Is the appropriate content visible on the page.

• They also check cookies, site certificates, and myriad protocols (POP3, SMTP, DNS, etc) to make sure those services are up.

• Alerts by email, pager, or automated 'voice call' system.

• Their pricing is by the number of 'tasks' monitored, starting at 79.00 per month.  http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/pricing.asp#packages

http://alertsite.com/

• Checks from multiple locations spread around the globe.

• Break down performance by DNS time, redirect time, time to first byte, etc.

• http://alertsite.com/web_site_monitoring.shtml

• Pricing starts at 9.95/page/month for checks every 60 minutes (+19.95 one-time setup fee).

• 34.95/page/month for 10 minute checks.  All from three different cities.

• Notification by voice call or SMS for additional fees.

• Good description of who would use the service. :)

http://ipwatcher.com/

• Hosted, $9.95/url for 60 minute checks, $24.95/url for 15 minute checks.

• Discounted 35% for 10 or more services.

• $19.95 one time setup fee, 10 day free trial.

http://www.internetseer.com/

• They have 24/7 staff that attempts to get your site back up, contacts your hosting provider, etc.

• Can add different notification lists for various types of problems, so particular people are called when various things are down.

• They charge 99.95 per year for the basic service, or 29.95 if you get the 'small business discount' (for which you have to fill out a form. Also, you can get it for free if you agree to take periodic surveys, receive emails, etc.

http://www.webmetrics.com/

• SiteMonitor service from $10/month per URL to $250 for content checks and benchmark comparisons to other sites.

• Checked from 20 servers around the world.

• They offer many other services, including web analytics to see how things are converting, etc.

http://www.checkupdown.com/

• Extremely basic service, just checking up or down, with rudimentary interface.

• Starts at $75/year for 1 URL monitored once every 60 minutes. Prices go up with frequency of check, as do many of the other services listed above.

http://www.hisoftware.com/

• Interesting service that checks sub-pages (presumably by spidering through all of them) to make sure they comply with privacy, content, or other guidelines. A service to check for profanity, inappropriate content, etc, would be interesting.

http://www.websitepulse.com/

• Interesting pricing model, very configurable.  Starting at $1/server, up to $29 additional for minute-by-minute checks.

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Site_Management/Monitoring/

• List of website monitoring sites in DMOZ.

http://alertra.com

• ICQ, AIM, etc. as alert methods.

• Alerts that escalate according to a particular schedule (notifying different people as they escalate).

• Ability to suspend checks during system maintenance times.

• Charge per device and monitoring time. $1/month per device for checks every 60 minutes, up to $60/month per device for checks every 1 minute.

• Interesting-looking interface, highly graphical.

         http://mercury.com/
         http://www.ipmonitor.com/
         http://siteimprove.com/

http://www.business.com/directory/internet_and_online/site_management/monitoring/

• List of website monitoring sites in business.com.