How to monitor a website's status

There are many free and commercial services that are capable of monitoring your website and notifying you if it goes down. You can also be notified of high latency, or inaccessibility from different parts of the world. Below are some of the top services.

• Pingdom - One of the top services for monitoring websites, Pingdom offers a free 30-day trial and then a monthly payment plan.
• Monitive - Another great service for monitoring websites, Monitive has free plans and monthly plans.
• Basicstate - Another website monitor service with free services and works off credits for extra features.

These services keep a constant monitor on your site and can also monitor DNS (domain name system), FTP, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), MySQL, POP3, and other services. Many of the services can also send you alerts over e-mail, SMS (short message service), and Twitter.