Jun
24
2009

Howsthe.com – Free Website Monitoring Service

No Comments Last Modified on June 24, 2009

I found a new free website monitoring service.(via Twitter )

Website (HTTP) Monitoring
Howsthe.com will monitor your websites or web services using the HTTP protocol. If there are any issues reaching your website or if we receive a HTTP status code other than one in the range of 200-300 (status codes), Howsthe.com will notify you by email and/or SMS. We can also search your page content for keywords and notify you if they’re not found.

Features

Simple To Use
Website Monitoring (HTTP, HTTPS)
Web service Monitoring
Keyword Search
Wait Period
Email Notification
SMS Notification
Timed Intervals
Notification to Multiple Location
Multiple Website Monitoring

Here are some of the features which I found extremely useful.

The keyword search tool is very useful and many free website monitoring services do not have this feature.
If your site is hacked or if your database goes down,you will be immediately notified.

Howsthe.com allows you to search the content of the website for a keyword or a phrase. This can prevent false positives on a website that is having database issues or application errors, the website my be reachable but is displaying errors. With keyword search you can require that the content of the website always includes this keyword or phrase.

SMS Notification

Howsthe.com can send SMS/text messages to many carriers, allowing for the quickest responses to a website issue.

I have an Airtel number and I from Bangalore,Karnataka.When I opened the list of carriers in the SMS notification options page,the first entry in the list was Airtel(Karnataka)
I was surprised.Generally most websites support only US and European Carriers.Till now I had never come across any site supporting Indian Carriers.So I entered my number and clicked the Test SMS button and, voila,I immediately got a test message from howsthe.com

I then manually changed the keywords of my site to check if all these features are not fake claims.
I immediately got a SMS and an email saying that the website is not working properly.

You can also add multiple email ids and mobile numbers to receive notifications.
I am impressed by Howsthe.com ‘s Website monitoring service and I recommend all webmasters to use this service to monitor their websites.