When you own and run just one or two web sites, checking in on them regularly is not a problem. But when your portfolio expands to 10 or 20 web sites, it can be a real time waster to constantly check to see if they're all running. Instead, I highly recommend you download a free web site checker that will do all of the grunt work for you.

First off, let me remind you that most web hosting companies promise a certain amount of uptime, but that doesn't mean they won't be down more often. The promise just means they'll give you refund for whatever you paid for the service. Under very few circumstances will a web host pay for lost revenue. Nor will they reimburse you should your site be down when a search engine comes crawling and repeatedly finds a dead web site. For these reasons, I think it makes sense to keep tabs yourself especially when it takes all of 10 minutes to set up.

My program of choice is call SiteUp. The company that created this software has several other programs they are trying to sell, but fortunately SiteUp is free. It also appears to be free of spyware/adware (I did a thorough scan). The interface is clean and very intuitive allowing you to schedule sites to be checked at any interval and keeping log files so you have a record you can show to your web host if necessary.

There are other programs too. I checked out one called Check4Me, but it didn't "feel" like the developers put as much effort in to it. And there are a whole host of web-based solutions that have the added advantage of not needing you to have your computer on for the monitoring software to work.