Monitor your website status for free with site24x7

If you have set up a website for a business, a company website or a blog, making sure that it is always running and up all the time is very important. If the website is down for any reason (except scheduled maintenance) you want to get notified about the situation so that you can take corrective action.

There are different solutions for monitoring website status in the market. I am going to use a third-party solution provider site24x7 to set up my website monitor alerts.

Site24x7 offers both free & paid website monitoring services. You can monitor websites remotely and receive instant email/SMS alerts if your website becomes unavailable. You can also view uptime & performance graphs of your website.

Under the free plan you can monitor up to 5 websites/servers, one hosted status page and AWS cloud cost analytics under $3000.

I am going to give a step-by-step process to set up a website monitor in site24x7 for my blog website as an example.

Setting up website monitor

Step 1) Go to site24x7 website and click on Sign up button on the right-hand corner of website, which takes you to sign up form.

Step 2) Sign-up for the service using your email and phone number (Note: while signing up select the data centre which is near to your hosting website server. This will help you, if you are monitoring the website performance)

Step 3) Once the Sign up is successful, you will receive a mail from Zoho to confirm your email address. Confirm your email address by clicking on the Confirm Account button.

Step 4) Sign into your account using your email.

Step 5) Once you sign in to your account you can set up two-factor authentication for more security. Site24x7 supports various two-factor authenticators.

Step 6) The welcome page contains various monitoring options.

Step 7) Since we are trying to set up the website monitor, click on the website card on the home page or click on the web icon on the left side menu.

Step 8) Clicking on the Web icon in the side menu brings another side menu that shows different monitors available on the site. Place your mouse cursor over the website menu, it will show a + icon on the side. Click on the + sign.

Step 9) Clicking on the `+` sign brings the following form. Fill in the details like name and website address and check frequency to set up the website monitor. If you want to determine your website is up and running not just by pinging it, but by checking its response, you can configure ‘Content check’ to check strings in the response.

You can configure the http methods “Post” or “Head” instead of default get methods.

Step 10) In the “Configuration Profiles” section you can set up when to alert users of failures and whom to alert. You can edit the default settings or set up your own settings.

Click on ‘Save’ button to save the monitor.

Step 10) The website gives options to set up different monitors for your website. You can choose the required monitors or skip to the dashboard screen.

Note : Each monitor is considered as a separate monitor and count towards allowed 5 free monitors.

Step 11) Once you set up the monitor the dashboard will look like below.

Based on your monitor settings, You will receive notification if the website is down, content is changed or response time is above a certain threshold.

You can monitor the response time of website over period time from dashboard

Setting up status page

Site24x7 also provides the option to set up the health/status page for your organisation. This status page is specially useful if you’re maintaining a B2B website or supporting third-party integrations.

Maintaining the status helps the customers to know about the health of your website and planned maintenance without flooding your support lines.

Below is the step-by-step process to set up the status page.

Step 1) Click on “Status” menu from the home page. Next click on the ‘Access StatusIQ’ button on the resulting page.

Step 2)You will be taken to status page home screen. On home screen click on the ‘Set up a status page’

Step 3) Fill details for status page like Status page name, org name and company website and click on save button

Step 4) You will be redirected to status page, where you can configure it to show different components.

Step 5) Click on the Add Component button. Under Add resource section select the “Import resources from Site24x7” option.

The page will list all the available monitors. Select the monitors you want to display in the status page and click on ‘save’ button.

Step 6) The monitor is added to status page

Step 7) Now click on the View Status Page link on the top right corner to view status page.

Step 8) You can customise the URL of the status page by clicking the settings icon on the left side and changing the status page url in General Settings page.

You can also add schedule maintenance window and other incidents which impacted the components in the status page by clicking on the Schedule Maintenanace and Add Historic Incident button.

Incidents and Scheduled maintenance displayed on status page.

In the paid version you can also make password protected status pages.