Webmon Review: A Realtime Website Monitoring Service

Running a website or web service can be a lot of work, it’s something that is supposed to be available all the time. Unlike many brick and motar businesses, a website is supposed to be online and accessible 24/7/365. And most of the time, provided you have a good web hosting provider and server administrator, you shouldn’t experience much downtime. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen, which is why I believe the web service I’m about to share with you is very useful.

Webmon is a website monitoring and escalation service that will help you minimize downtime. In the most simplest of terms, Webmon will continually check on your website or web service to ensure it’s providing some kind of response (meaning it’s online) and if for some reason it goes offline for a specified period of time, Webmon will notify you, so you can look into the issue and resolve it as quickly as possible.

How does Webmon work?

Webmon’s realtime monitoring tool allows website owners to utilize several different types of features in order to check on their website and/or web service. With Webmon, you can look for string matches in response, compare HTTP response codes, append additional headers, authenticate, and even apply HTTP POST, PUT, GET, and HEAD methods. In addition to traditional HTTP monitors, you can also setup monitors for DNS, FTP, SMTP, ICMP, and TCP.  The service even offers the ability to monitor HTTP Transactions, so you can ensure that your e-commerce website is fully functional at all times (even if there’s multiple steps in the checkout process).

Every monitor is highly configurable, making them easy to customize to your liking. Webmon also has four different geographic locations where their servers are located (US East, US West, Asia, and Europe), which means you can setup separate monitors (or a single monitor) for your website and/or web service based on location. This can be useful to see if a particular issue is contained to a specific region or if its worldwide.

And as we mentioned before, if an issue does arise, you can have Webmon notify the right people using its custom triggers and escalation tools.

With the custom triggers, you can tell Webmon to only notify you if an outage is occurring for a specific period of time. So for example, if BestTechie is not accessible for at least one minute within a three minute timespan, I configured Webmon to inform me via text message and email.

If there are multiple people who handle your servers, you can even configure Webmon to have different stages of escalation, which means you can have more than one person assigned and made aware of issues depending on how severe and extended the downtime becomes.

Pricing for Webmon starts at $8.99/month which supports up to 12 monitors and two users.

Overall, Webmon does what it’s supposed to do.  Its simple and clean interface makes it easy and quick to setup, which in the end helps you keep your website online.