7 Services to Monitor Website Uptime for Free

7 min readDec 15, 2021

Pop quiz, hotshot: Without opening up the backend of your website (or tracking down an old developer to do it), how well is your website doing right now? How well has it been doing in the last week? Or month?

Understanding these metrics is a critical component to running a successful website. So, why don’t you know the answers? And more to the point, how do you find the answers if you do not know them? You could employ someone to keep track of your website’s traffic through an analysis of the backend, but that is a lot to ask.

The best way to keep track of your website’s uptime is with a website uptime monitor service. So, here are the seven best services you can get to monitor your website for free right now.

Status Cake

Status Cake is the go-to website for testing a website’s traffic at high speeds. The reason why this is because while it is highly reliable and a great all around monitor website for free, it is best used for websites that already have traffic. This is because it analyzes data on a second to second interval.

Truth be told, it actually goes much faster than that. Status Cake can update by the millisecond, and it does indeed have features to that effect, but it keeps them locked behind menus. The reason it keeps them locked behind menus is because if you want to monitor website status properly you have to be able to see it.

Millisecond to millisecond coverage of a website’s traffic only helps a machine understand what is going on. A human can look at that coverage and see a high resolution trend as traffic goes up and down, but no single number can hold significance in that situation because no single number sticks around long enough.

Status Cake is a great website for monitoring your traffic if you already have traffic and is even better as you become more advanced and incorporate machines into your analyses. But without those two things going for you, then you are paying for features you cannot yet use.

1. Pulsetic

Here is a quick review of what a website uptime monitoring service can offer you:

Second updates
Minute to minute updates
Site uptime monitor.
Website speed monitor.
Complete reports that include detailed information about every request.
Full request customization.
Regions check.
Email, Slack, Telegram, Webhook, SMS alerts.
Voice calls.
Integration with Twilio and SIGNL4.
Status pages.
Status pages for incident updates.
Subscribers notification.
Teammate collaboration.

Pulsetic has a user interface that is just as intuitive to the common investor as it is to the web developer. It will allow you to not only monitor and analyze the status of your website, but it will allow an entire team to communicate about what is going on with their operations without having to explain anything.

Uptime Robot

While most sites will have a free trial period that goes into an actual use period, Uptime Robot is not 100% free. Remember how Status Cake’s big issue was that you needed a machine to make the most use of it? Well, Uptime Robot comes with its own tools for interpreting fast paced data.

The issue is that it does not gather that data as fast. There are no millisecond to millisecond updates with Uptime Robot. You might be wondering: Why does that matter? Well, especially with higher userbase websites, tracking individual users’ behavior to the millisecond is critical to generating ad revenue and income.

There is an internet line that connects the eastern and western hemispheres. It runs from New York to London, and it takes around 150 milliseconds for a transmission to travel that distance. A financial firm on Wall Street paid for a whole new internet line that can send a transmission in around 70 milliseconds. But why?

Because the fewer milliseconds it takes to send a packet of data, the more transactions can happen in a day. That internet line cost millions to put down, but earns its money back and more every year. Uptime Robot lacking millisecond updates means that it can only handle so much website uptime monitoring per day.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a tough sell to make on paper, but in practice everyone who uses it is taken in by it. With all of the talk about millisecond updates you would be forgiven for thinking that it is the end all be all of website uptime monitoring. But when you are just starting out, and even when you are a seasoned vet, there are more fundamental tools than that.

Pingdom has two main tools: “Synthetic” monitoring, which is monitoring done by a machine, and “Real Time” monitoring, which is done by a human being. The unique thing that Pingdom brings is monitoring that is specialized for a variety of different kinds of websites.

Consider a tax service’s website. A tax service will have an abundance of traffic, but only during certain parts of the year. It does not need millisecond tracking — it barely needs minute to minute tracking. What it needs is tools for understanding huge loads of people. That is what Pingdom provides.

Whether your website is made for a governmental service or a temporary business, Pingdom will help you organize your infrastructure to be as stable as possible for those times when you are overloaded. And when the data becomes too much for you to track, you can use Synthetic tracking to “zoom out” and have it delivered to you in the broader strokes while still being useful.

Millisecond tracking is a brute force method of data collection. Pingdom instead provides an elegant method.

ManageEngine

You are, hopefully, not the only person interested in the traffic of your website. Whether you are a solo developer or not, there are investors, upper managers, and even subordinates who will need to see the data you are looking at. As its name implies, that is ManageEngine’s specialty.

ManageEngine is a website uptime monitoring service that combines analysis tools with team communication tools. Not all information can be conveyed (or can even fit) in an email. If you need to simulate a new build for your website, that will require a lot of information to be transferred over many different files. That would be a nightmare to send over a normal email. So, what do you do?

ManageEngine allows you to send analytics, website builds, and simulations over its dedicated shared development space. It even allows you to create presentations for personnel that are not versed on how to monitor website status. This is in addition to all its native tools for analysis and website uptime monitoring.

Monitive

There are so many website uptime monitoring services that it can feel daunting to even give one a try. How do you know which one is even worth your time? How do you know which one will even give you accurate information, or even more importantly accurate analysis of that information?

Monitive has a solution to this: Rather than a laborious trial period, Monitive gives you the option to simply plug your website URL in and see what it has to say before you even download anything. This is an invaluable service on its own, as it gives you a frame of reference to compare it with any other tools you have used.

But it gets even better, as Monitive also has some of the most reliable analysis tools on the market. This is because Monitive pays as much attention to downtime as it does to uptime. It tracks the trends in downtime compared to known variables, and when there is a lack of known variables it helps you set up parameters for the unknown variables that you will want to plan around.

While this might sound complicated to some people, it actually means that Monitive is surprisingly user friendly. Tracking website uptime trends is something you will do with every tool that monitor website uptime free. Many users are not looking for an explanation as to why their website is working, but are instead looking to understand what is causing it to not work, and what they can do about it.

Uptrends

No one in the web development space wants to admit it, but web development does not exist in a bubble. Your website can have the best web design on the planet but still have no traffic due to product releases, market trends, and even foreign currency values. But how do you track that information?

Uptrends is a website uptime monitoring service that combines all of your factors in one place. Your web design, your chosen external factors, as well as alerts for things that its system determines are impacting your website’s traffic that you might not have even though of. Uptrends is a great way to track what is going on with your website in relation to the wider world.

It also happens to be the service used by sites like Vimeo, NASA, and even bigger companies like Space X and Microsoft. With Uptrends you are in good hands.

Conclusion

Now, what is that missing? What is the kind of company that is most likely to need a website uptime monitoring service in the first place? The answer is startups. And no one takes better care of startups than Pulsetic.

Not only that, but at the same time that it is user friendly Pulsetic is also packed with features. Whether you need high speed monitoring, file sharing, or automation, Pulsetic will provide it for you. When it comes to technology it seems like you can never have it all. But Pulsetic offers you everything you need and more to get your startup’s website operational and thriving.