Awhile ago, I read about a service called Montastic, which is a website monitoring service. The idea behind something like Montastic is to let you know when your website goes down or is unreachable. That way you can be made aware instantly of the problem, and presumably go and fix it. I can't remember where I read about it, but it struck me as something I might have a use for, so I kept a note about it until recently. As they claim (on their website): "The free website monitoring service that doesn't suck." Ok, let's try it shall we? A couple weeks ago I signed up (easy) and setup the monitoring for a couple sites, including this one (easy again). I set it up so that it would send me an email when one of the sites went down (still easy). The process took about 10 minutes and it was extremely easy. There was some functionality I didn't bother experimenting with, I just wanted to test this thing out. It didn't require any code be added to my sites and the setup was a no-brainer. I almost forgot about it until a couple days ago when I received the following email: ************** Subject: [MONTASTIC] unreachable: http://www.igotnewsforyou.com We thought you wanted to know about this: ### ### Website status: unreachable ### ### Mon Mar 27 17:28:00 CST 2006 ### Name: ### URL: http://www.igotnewsforyou.com ### -- The crew. http://www.montastic.com *************** Of course I wasn't available at the time to deal with it, but 9 minutes later I received another email telling me the site was back up and running. Simple. Easy. And it works. You can't really ask for more than that. There's all kinds of monitoring tools/services out there, some obviously better than others. Montastic is ultra-easy and free (which is hard to argue with). Of course, if your site goes down and it's a mission critical type thing (unlike this blog) then you'll want to respond immediately and try to resolve the problem. In my case this was more out of interest sake. Still, it's nice to know when your site goes down, and when we go live with IGotNewsForYou.com it will be more mission critical, because the website is our lifeline to the business. Give Montastic a try if you're interested in simple website monitoring. P.S. I don't know the Montastic crew, there was no incentive for writing this except to spread the news about something worthwhile. (Although if the people at Montastic and the parent company Metadot want to donate something to our writing contest I won't argue.) (Technorati Tags: montastic, metadot, website monitoring tools)