While Virtual Private Servers give the flexibility of hosting multiple websites and hundreds of email accounts, you need to make sure its all up and running. Nothing is worse than receiving a call from a client (that’s paying you premium monthly fee) that a service is down. You should be notified of it before they find out so you can say that you’re aware and on top of it!

Enter server monitoring. There’s many options out there that’ll inform you via Email, SMS or even Twitter when something stops working. If you’re starting out, here’s one that’s free – www.mon.itor.us.

As you can see on the right, you have the option of monitoring various ports and services and setting how often you want it to check your server – it can be as frequent as every 1 min (for the paranoid webmaster – Premium version only). It’ll check your website from 3 locations – Austria, Germany and the US to ensure its not just a temporary ISP network issue before it sends you an email.

The feature that I like is the weekly email report that will compare your site with another benchmark site. The report will contain your uptime, average and the number of times your server was inaccessible. These reports have really saved me a few times when clients have complained that their sites were down “according to their friends” and I was able to prove that its fine from 3 worldwide locations…

Another use for services like these is to check the uptime for a host. Ask them for a typical server you can monitor and set mon.itor.us to check it for a month. While you’re at it, check it against a few other potential hosts as comparison!