Website Pulse

I trialled a great subscription service whilst I was out of the office over the Christmas holidays called Website pulse. This lets you set up virtually any number of different SMS or email alert notifications in the event that a website that you have 'targeted' becomes unavailable.

The system lets you specify how often it 'pings' a target website and you can set it to increase the frequency of pings if a website has gone down. It also provides notification when a website is restored as well as daily logs and reports of duration outage.

Pricing is based on a number of factors such as how many sites you monitor and how often you are text once a fault is detected but best of all it gives you a months free trial. One of their support team even called me to make sure I had set it up as I wanted and didn't have any questions.

Whilst I'm sure there are other systems out there websitepulse seemed to do what it says on the tin and would be worth thinking about if you have a role that relies on access to web-based services or sites.