<a href="http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/view.php?widget=38681"I built my first website back around 1994, when I was a college dean, websites were still something of a rarity outside of academe, and one had to learn coding to make words bold or italic. My first ADR business website was born in 1997 and as with anything that evolves, there have been good moments and bad.
In that decade plus, my website has occasionally disappeared temporarily, most often from an outage at my webhost or other event I can’t control. I used to learn about such moments from a phone message or email like this: “Hi, Tammy, thanks for providing me with your website address. Unfortunately, I went there today and I’m getting an error message saying the site can’t be found. When it’s working again, let me know and I’ll see if I can find the time to take a look.”
Ugh. Messages like that are a lousy way to find out your site is down, because you want to know before you clients do, giving you time to look into it and figure out what’s up. So when I heard about Montastic, I thought I’d give them a try.
Montastic is a completely free web monitoring service that checks your site automatically at least every 10 minutes. If it’s ok, nothing happens. If it’s unreachable, Montastic will send you an email notification, then a follow-up email when the site’s back. If you’d rather not get an email notice, you can sign up for notification via RSS feed. Even better, you can download a desktop widget that displays the status of your site at a quick glance.
It took me less than a minute to sign up for Montastic and set up the monitor for my sites…all I needed was the site URL (web address). It’s truly that simple. Created by software company Metadot for their own use, they’ve put it out there for us to benefit from as well. And benefit we do.
I’ve used Montastic for about a month and it’s been true to its word. Most outages are very brief and mean no real difference to clients and prospective clients stopping by my website. So, I’ve learned that when I get a notice that a site is unreachable, I don’t need to think much about it unless I don’t get the follow-up “all is well” email soon afterward. Since I have sites served by two different webhosts at the moment, it’s been quite an eye opener to see which host has the most frequent outages.
Worth a look-see,
Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
