Monitoring your server / website uptime is very important for any user and here at BWF we have an internal monitoring system that alerts our staff to any outage on our...
Our Managed Migration Service makes it easy to move your hosting and email to us We love it when clients take that step to move their web hosting over to our network and we know...
On Thursday 14th April 2016 the good folks at cPanel are coming to Scotland to bring a one day cPanel conference and cPanel experience to Edinburgh. The Big Wet Fish Team will be...
Let’s talk security! There’s a good chance you’re using WordPress on your website. Why? Because VentureBeat recently reported that WordPress now powers 25% of all websites and...
GTmetrix is an awesome free tool that we’ve been using for a while now to assess how you can speed up your site by following their simple recommendations and tweaks. It uses...
We’re pleased to announce the launch of our long awaited new website which has been tweaked to better serve you.. We invite you to visit the website and explore what’s new. As...
Build a high quality website in minutes with Big Wet Fish and Weebly We are pleased to introduce Weebly’s powerful drag and drop website building tool as the latest addition to...
cPanel Roadmap in 2015 into 2016 We are shameless cPanel fans here at BWF being the control panel of choice for all our shared, business and reseller servers. 80% of our managed...
Work Experience Students coming to Big Wet Fish is nothing new and sometimes yes they do make the coffee!! But in this instance we have a work experience placement student with a...
Server Management in Action – Fully Managed VPS Servers It’s the Holiday weekend here in the UK and Ireland and whilst many of you were off enjoying the long weekend our...
Monitoring your server / website uptime is very important for any user and here at BWF we have an internal monitoring system that alerts our staff to any outage on our network. Below you will find a number of additional tools that you may want to use in addition to relying on our monitoring and Statuscake is our preferred option given it is free, has unlimited monitors and has a really cool user interface.
Statuscake comes top of our list for having a fully featured FREE offering and in our opinion blows the other free offerings out of the water.
Their website boasts: “Feature Rich Uptime Monitoring, Domain Monitoring, SSL Monitoring and a whole lot more.”
The FREE plan which the website claims is free forever boasts
This should be more than enough for your monitoring needs. Here at BWF we set up the free account and were really impressed with what this service had to offer.
There is a really cool dashboard showing all your servers you are monitoring in one cool location. You can see at a glance the uptime in % as well as the response time. On the free plan it’s perhaps unfair to pay any attention to the response time as they only promise random check locations.
As you can see each server you monitor comes with detailed statistics on where it was monitored from.
Place an uptime button on your website or make it available to potential clients. We always find clients like to see third party monitored uptime statistics as they cannot easily be ‘fudged’ or manipulated. Give your clients confidence that the uptime they are seeing is monitored by a third party.
A really cool feature of this product that we have seen only on premium paid for products is to allow you to set up a public reporting page where you can be transparent in your uptime.
Until Statuscake was born we would have always recommended Uptime Robot as the Original and Best free uptime monitoring service. It boasts 50 free checks at 5 minute intervals with paid offerings allowing for more checks and 1 minute intervals.
Here are a few details from the Uptime Robot Website: “Everyone with a website knows that, things can sometimes go wrong. Sometimes it is with the code, the server or the network….”
Uptime Robot is all about helping you to keep your websites up. It monitors your websites every 5 minutes and alerts you if your sites are down (actually, it is smarter, details below).
Here are the step-by-step actions of Uptime Robot to understand it better:
Source: ‘Uptime Robot Website’
As you can see the Uptime Robot dashboard is easy to follow and the information provided is useful where you can see at a glance how your websites are performing. We added 5 random servers into this product and you can see the information provided.
There is also a cool TV mode where you can set it to display your stats on a TV screen and it does auto refresh.
Uptime Robot does allow you to see individual stats for single servers as well much like the Statuscake offering
We have seen these guys at a number of the industry conferences we have recently attended. They are cool people, have awesome free t-shirts and our office looks more and more like a “teenagers bedroom” with their swag! With that said we have not actually used their service as there is no free offering.
Their basic monitoring is $5 per month for a total of 5 monitors. It is fully features and you can take a trial for 30 days.
For basic monitoring Statuscake is your best option. They promise it free forever and you also have the option ot upgrade for a relatively competitive cost for the additional features offered.