Best Site Monitoring Service
 

I want to be able to monitor my sites and get updates via email when they are down.

At least one per server.

Any suggestions?

pingdom.com here

they have sms features too using paid credits.

for 1 site and 1 tracker free
pingdom.com/free

I use siteuptime.com ---- its free and seems to work pretty well.


Looking forward to hearing other suggestions.

Pingdom.com and Monitor.us

How does it work. Do you install code onto the sites themselves? Does this have any negative effects in terms of ranking ever?

nope.you dont install anything , its like remote pinging which checks whether site is up, you can add checks like check if specific text is appear on site,
no ranking effects .

Pingdom sms is decent.

Go with alertsite.com both sns n emaik n many other features

get server monitoring from your hosting provider instead... :winkwink:

Been using uptimerobot.com for a while

we use websitepulse.com - and get texts when servers are down and monitors from multiple locations. can be set to alert when only 3 or more locations are unavailable. works good for us

monitis.com i think you can even try free

Is that reliable when the host goes down?

Well.. what can I say.. got cloud... got autoscale but if something goes wrong my hosting support calls me to ask me for root access, so they can fix it. Good enough? Ask yours what they can offer.

if you want some more system specific monitoring try

http://newrelic.com/

its good

With this, which do I choose to just check the sites? Ping or HTTPs?