One of the biggest problems among websites in the Philippines is the frequent downtime of servers. I am an avid reader of some of the most influential marketing and personal branding blogs in the country and the thing that bugs me most is when I get an error whenever I visit their sites. Of course there are times the site owners don’t even know it and as a reader, I often find myself emailing them to check on their web hosts.

The same problem can happen to your site. Even if you have a very reliable web hosting service, downtime is still inevitable. So what do we do now? I don’t think there’s much that we can do about it really, except to contact the server admin and ask them to fix the problem. However, there is a way for you to help fix the problem before you lose significant traffic to your site. You should be the first to know when your server is down.

By knowing your server downtime in just a matter of minutes, you might even be able to fix the problem before your customers know it. All you need is a server monitoring application that notifies you whenever your site isn’t responding to requests. You might want to try the following:

1. Pingdom- Allows you to check your website uptime every minute if you really need to. Pingdom boast serving big time websites like Alexa, Mashable, CNet, TechCrunch, LastFM and many others. Free account allows you track only one website. You can upgrade to a paid account if you have multiple websites to monitor.

2. Was It Up- It’s easy, it’s free and no registration is required. You simply type the url you want to monitor, provide an email address and you’re signed up. You can add up to ten websites for monitoring. The only thing that I noticed when I signed up was that I wasn’t asked to verify anything. There’s no dashboard, no page where you can see history stats, they only send you a notification when your site is down. I guess this could mean that anyone can monitor sites they don’t even own.

3. Mon.itor.us. Okay, here’s another domain that uses a common word but is hard to remember when you type it in your browser (the other one is Delicious). Mon.itor.us is more than just an uptime checker, it also integrates traffic analysis and visitor tracking.

4. Binary Canary. This one is my favorite. It can track up to five websites for free and you can set it to check your server every 15 minutes. Other free services can only update you every 60 minutes and by the time you are notified, your server could have been up again. This service includes SMS notifications too. There are paid upgrades which allows you to check every minute but if you’re a new blogger or web owner, you may not need by the minute reports just yet.

5. Hyperspin. Free account for this service monitors your sites every sixty minutes. No SMS alerts included.

Disclosure: Inspired by a post from Daily Blog Tips.

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