I have a web site I’ve been working on that tends to go down at odd times during the night. It’s an issue with the web host, and due to financial constraints my client is not willing to relocate the site anytime soon. So I’m stuck with having to log in and reset everything whenever the site goes down. It only happens once a month or so, but since the site receives a small amount of traffic it often takes several hours (sometimes several days) for anyone to inform me that it’s down. Enter Montastic.
It’s rare that a free service comes along that is dead simple to use, works the first time (and every single time after that), and is ad-free. Montastic scores 110% on all counts. It’s a web-based monitoring service written in Rails that delivers notification via e-mail or RSS when a monitored site goes down.
Montastic’s UI is very straightforward, some might say even elegant. Sign-up took a few seconds. Logging in, a few more. Adding my site was a breeze (it only asks for the URL, amazingly enough). I subscribed to my feed and was off and running.
Montastic has already proven useful by alerting me to a server that went down just a few hours prior to writing this review. My sleep is that much easier knowing that Montastic is out there, ready to sound the alarm if my sites so much as twitch.
Go ahead, try it out.