Free Website Monitoring Reviews:

Monitor Your Website’s Uptime Using Google Docs

No law against it, but one of my copywriting Clients took Sunday off.

No harm in that, except that while he was away from his computer, his popular reputation management website portal, used by hundreds of businesses daily, went down.

Not good.

And not his fault at all. But come Monday morning, he had to take some heat.

Had I only known, I could have told him about this…

Google’s free website monitoring service.

Had he only known, he could have mitigated an embarrassing customer service black eye.

You can use Google Docs to monitor your website(s) and unlike the  services you pay for, Google has NO RESTRICTIONS.

That means unlimited websites can be tracked. Google Docs will send email or text message alerts in the event of any issues.

Free Website Monitoring Reviews:

This DIY website monitoring service is absolutely free.

You can quickly configure Google Docs to monitor the uptime/downtime of your all your websites. It has to be done just once.

From then on, Google Docs will continuously monitor all your sites in the background.

Free Website Monitoring Reviews:

Here’s how to make Google’s website monitoring service happen:

• Sign-in to your Google account and then click here to copy this Google sheet into your Google Drive. You may use your Google Apps account as well.

• Put your website URLs in cell B2 (comma separated) and your email address in cell B3. If you wish to be alerted by text messages, just replace No with Yes in cell B4.

• You’ll find a new Website Monitor menu in your Google Docs toolbar. Click Initialize and you’ll get a pop-up asking for authorization. Grant the necessary access.

• Go to the Website Monitor menu again and choose “Start” to begin the monitoring process.  Close the Google Sheet.

You’re done!

The Google Docs sheet will now monitor your websites in the background every five minutes.

If there’s trouble, it will email or text an alert saying it has trouble accessing the website.

Then, when the website issue’s fixed, you’ll get an “all’s well” alert.

Pretty cool, uh?

Now unless you’ve got an issue with Google, there’s no reason to be blindsided again.

PS: Side benefit? Uptime and downtime times get logged in the same Google Docs sheet so you can use the data to analyze the performance of your web hosting company.

File Under: Free Website Monitoring Reviews: The Free, Easy and  UNRESTRICTED Solution