The unique thing about online business is the fact that your most crucial asset is virtual. Add to it the fact that your virtual office can ‘go down’ with the whims and fancies of your hosting or network provider means that you lose dollars with every minute that your site is down. The solution is obvioulsy to ensure that you select hosting providers who have no downtime. But every webmaster knows that there is no hosting provider that gives 100% uptime day after day. So what can you do? At the least you can find out that your online business had a blackout and inform the hosting company to do something about it ASAP. To do this, you obviously need to know that your site is down. This is what we will be looking at today using a free service by FreeSiteStatus.com.

FreeSiteStatus.com is a free service that continuously monitors your website or server by pinging it and then emails you the result every day, week or month. You can set the frequency of monitoring from one every minute to one every hour. The service is provided by using a set of 9 monitoring servers located around the globe. The service also has addon benefits like being able to send you SMS’s whenever the site is down as well as inform the hosting provider to reboot the server in certain circumstances. To read a complete list of features, click here.

Signing up and setting up your account is not only free but very simple. It took me less than a minute get the account up and running. Once you create your account, you need to set up the websites to be monitored. To do this you need to provide the url to be monitored and the frequency of checks. That is all. It really is simple and takes less than a minute.

The professional version of this account also allows to receive SMS messages on your mobile whenever your site is down. This means you are up to date with the status of the site in real time. The professional service costs $2 per month for a monitoring interval of 15 minutes. The professional version also allows monitoring of advanced ports and services like ping, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSH, SMTP, DNS, POP3, IMAP, MySQL, and any arbitrary services running on TCP/IP.

Let us know your feedback on this service.