Ever had that, in an email or phone call, and thought: if only I’d known earlier?
There are plenty of ways to monitor a web site’s availability, but I thought it should be simple to do a custom monitoring application in Visual Basic. Here it is, as described in the August 2008 Personal Computer World. One advantage of this approach is that you can write your own rules for what counts as available. For example, you can set the acceptable response time; or check the content of a page.
It’s very basic. For example, the alert just calls the FlashWindow API. You’d probably want to change it, maybe fire off an email or two. I may improve it over time, but no promises.
I have used Alerta at http://www.alerta.com to monitor availability for years now. They offer a wide range of services – I pay $9.95 a month for a basic check once an hour and a weekly email summary. One advantage is that they monitor from different stations in the US, Europe and Asia.
The august issue is already out? Man, they publish early!