Receive unlimited free SMS alerts when your site is unavailable

An article by Bharat Balegere    No Comments  Last Modified on August 14, 2010

A website monitoring service checks your website at regular intervals and notifies you via email or SMS if it becomes unavailable.Most free site monitoring services send free email alerts, but charge for SMS alerts.In this guide I will show you how to set up a website monitoring service with free SMS alerts.

Pingdom is a great Site Monitoring Service. The free Pingdom account lets you monitor one website or server and includes 20 free SMS alerts. Email alerts are free. Pingdom also supports Twitter Direct Messages.

1. Set up SMS alerts with Hotmail
2. Set up your mobile with Twitter
3. Go to Pingdom and sign up for a free account.
4. Enter your Hotmail ID and your Phone number
5. Login to your Pingdom account and click on Checks on the left hand sidebar and enter the details of the website to be monitored
6. Now click on contacts. You will see your Name, Hotmail ID and your Mobile number.Under the Edit field click on the middle button to edit your details.
7. Enter you twitter username here and follow @pingdomalert
8. Enable SMS alerts by clicking on the tiny mobile icon(You can find this icon next to the text “Following” at @pingdomalert)

Now whenever your site goes down, Pingdom sends an email, sms and a twitter direct message.
Now you get 3 SMS alerts whenever your site goes down.
Since your Hotmail is configured to send SMS alerts you get a SMS. Pingdom too sends an SMS to your phone and Twitter also sends you a SMS.

Once your 20 free SMS credits are used up in Pingdom, you still still get free email alerts and twitter direct messages which in turn sends you SMS.So you still get 2 SMS alerts to your phone whenever your site goes down.

The best part is that you also get a SMS alert when your site is back online.

You are really paranoid about your site ‘s uptime you also use Uptime Robot another free site monitoring service along with Pingdom.This free service sends free email alerts and Twitter Direct Messages whenever your site goes down.So you two additional SMS alerts whenver your site goes down.