Is Your Website Down? Get Alerted With Pingdom

Have you ever gone to find something on your blog and discovered that your website is down? This happened to me twice over the Christmas break for different reasons, my general reaction is usually to panic. Luckily on both occasions the issues were resolved quickly.

Unless we are constantly viewing our site how are we to know that there is a problem? We can’t always rely on our customers to tell us when our website is down, that’s where this weeks cool tool comes in handy. Pingdom monitors your website for you and lets you know if there is an issue, and the good news is that if you are just monitoring one website it’s free.

Here’s How It Works

Visit www.pingdom.com

If you have just one website you can choose ‘free sign up’ option. For multiple websites there is a 30 day trial.

Once you have signed up with your email address you will be asked to provide some additional info including your country (big bug bear here – there’s no ‘Ireland’ listed so I had to choose United Kingdom), timezone and your preferred date and number format.

Now it’s time to add the details of the website you want to monitor under ‘create a check’

You can choose how often you want your site checked, how long after it’s down that you should be notified and how you would like to be notified. Initially you are just offered email and SMS but you can add more options once the sign up process is complete.

I think it’s a good idea to get notifications sent to an email not attached to your site so I added my gmail address here. If my site is down it’s possible my email is too

The free version gives you 20 free SMS alerts to notify you that your site is down and you can buy more from the settings menu once these have been used. (Ireland is included as an option for SMS)

If you would prefer to be notified via Twitter or via your mobile device (iOS or Android) you can add these options in the contacts menu on the top toolbar. Just click the little green pen next to the user name that you want to add info to.

For Twitter updates make sure you are following @pingdomalert first as they will be unable to send you DM’s i you don’t.

For iOS or Android devices you need to install the Pingdom app

And that’s it. You’re all good to go, you just need to wait for your website to go down to know it works – and hopefully it will be a while before that happens.

A massive thanks to Beatrice Whelan for letting me know apps such as this existed and if you want to check out an alternative service Neville Hobson recommended Hyperspin to me.

If you use an alternative service for this purpose I’d love to hear about it. Leave me a comment below.