'Are My Sites Up?' keeps an eye on uptime

Are My Sites Up is a free service that monitors Web sites to see if everything is up and running. You simply plug in the URLs of whatever sites you want to keep an eye on (they don't even have to be yours), and it will send you an alert if it notices one is down.

It does this by visiting each page on your list--up to 50 per user--every 15 minutes. If it can't load the page, you get an e-mail. You can also plug in your mobile phone number to get an SMS alert.

I very much like the idea, since you just set it and forget it. It's a nice complement to downforeveryoneorjustme.com which does the same check, but for the people unsuccessfully attempting to visit your site who believe their local undersea cable may have been cut again.

(via Delicious)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[chrisbulow]

Slightly funny that this site is sooooooo slow to load after cNet mention it...

[jacobijn]

We have a cron running on another server which checks whether our main server is working. It checks:

-ping
-sql database
-web page

My IT team and I receive an SMS in the event something is wrong.

[MrZoo]

Hey, maybe this is another way to increase your website hits and could increase your ranks in google! Haha.

[ImRob]

Would be good if it worked. I have three sites on there. A Wordpress blog, a domain with placeholder and a vBulletin forum.

Both the blog and placeholder "go down" at least once a day. Today, "down" at 6:54am, back up at 1:06pm. They were both online and fully working at these times. The vBulletin forum never goes down.

Strangely, during an actual period of downtime today, lasting approximately 2 hours, none of my 3 sites reported any downtime. According to my vBulletin site's logs, they've only checked 4 times in the past 24 hours.

Hey thanks Josh and everyone at CNet for the coverage!

@ImRob - Sorry about the trouble you've had so far. We are still new and working squelch bugs. We have since pushed a couple of updates that hopefully have minimized these false-down notifcations. We are also in the process of pushing out some updates that are going to make site checking much faster and smarter and hopefully will get back to 15 minute checks very soon. Lastly, we soon hope to provide more details on the event that triggered the down notification (so you can see if it was a timeout or an authentication error or whatnot).

Thanks for bearing with us while we are still new and working to get things running smoothly!