If you have a website, uptime is really important. You can’t afford your site to go down all the time, but of course, you need a way to know, and quickly. Unless you want to open your browser and constantly refreshed your own website, there are some online service that offer ways to uptime monitoring for free. Here are some.

Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot offers 50 monitors on their free plan. The way it works, Uptime Robot have several locations around the world that constantly checks the target using the checking protocol that you have set. They support HTTP(S), ping, port and keywords. If at any time during that 5 minutes period they see that your site is down, they verify the claim by checking from another location, and notify you through multiple channels, like emails, mobile apps or integration with 3rd party tools like Slack. They also offer public status page for free, so if you need a way to display your uptime to your customers, Uptime Robot might be the solution.

Statuscake

Recently rising in popularity due to its power-user feature and helpful support (their live chat is pretty responsive), statuscake offers a community edition of their uptime monitoring service. Their paid features are pretty comprehensive, but their community (free) edition is not all that bad. You can set unlimited monitors that will check on your site every 5 minutes, and get an email notification if your site is down.

Monitis (Previously monitor.us)

Another one free solution that’s also pretty reliable, Monitis offers uptime check every 15 minutes and notify you of downtime by email. One thing that’s cool about Monitis is they have other suite of free tools available such as Visual Traceroute (useful if you’re having connectivity issue but not sure whether or not it’s your own making or the provider), and Page Load speed test. The page load speed test can also be automated on their free plan, that will check your site’s page load time every 60 minutes (useful to know whether or not the server is under a heavy load)

Uptimedog

Although their site doesn’t have the prettiest of UI and kind of looks like it came straight out of 1999, Uptime Dog advantage is the frequency of checks that they offer on their free plan. They will check your site every 2 minutes, and will notify you via email if your site is down.

Livewatch

If you’re looking for a non-email notification system, Livewatch offers 1 sms alert each month on their free plan. Checking frequency is 10 minutes.

Anturis

Although more known as an enterprise class full suite of monitoring tools provider, Anturis also offer free plan that’s probably the most mouthwatering out of all the free uptime monitoring service provider. They will check your site every 1 minute, and their features are quite powerful. It will monitor page load, SSL and others. You are limited to only 5 monitors on their free plan though.

Happy Apps

Having one of the most beautifully designed website and easy to use interface around, Happy Apps is really one to try. Their free plan is limited to 3 monitors that will check every 5 minutes interval. But they don’t only monitor uptime though, their service provides full stack monitoring that includes every components to a web server (SSH level monitoring). They will keep the history of the uptime for 2 days on their free plan.

Servermonitoring

A reasonably new provider to the game, Servermonitoring offers basic server monitoring for 10 URLS, 10 servers and 10 IP Address. They will keep the uptime history for 24 hours and you can get alerts through integration with Skype/Slack.

Rapidspike

Rapidspike offers full featured server monitoring that will check your site’s uptime every 5 minutes on their free plan. The check is being done from 3 locations, and they will notify you via email, sms, and voice call. The great thing about them, is that they give you 10 free credits of sms/voice call notification. After that, credits can be bought from them at a price.

Monitority

This one probably comes into the “too-good-to-be-true” territory. Monitority offers 1 minute intervals uptime check, sms, twitter and email notifications, unlimited checks and monitors, all for free.