Montastic monitors Web sites for free

Keeping track of whether your Web sites are alive can be done in many ways. In past Web Application newsletters, we’ve covered a number of services that do this and we just stumbled over a new one with some nice attributes – including one of the nicest in that it is free.

Montastic, offered by Metadot, has the tag line “the free Web site monitoring service that doesn’t suck” and indeed, it doesn’t.

You register for an account and the only commercial sounding offer Montastic makes is “E-mail me some news from time to time” which is optional. The chaps at Montastic also have a sense of humor – where other Web sites would use “My profile” and “My servers,” Montastic uses “Me profile” and “Me servers.” The chaps are obviously grok Starwars as they offer “Save” and “Save not” for every configuration form.

Once registered you can define up to 100 sites to be monitored. Server status is shown when you log in to your account but Montastic provides several other ways to keep tabs on your servers’ status.

You can define up to five e-mail addresses in addition to the account’s primary address to receive status reports. You’ll get an e-mail when you’re site goes down and when it comes back up.

You also get an RSS feed and the Montastic developers have produced a widget for the Yahoo Widgets system to provide desktop notification.

Registered Web servers are monitored at least once every 10 minutes but as the service is free, Montastic notes that it doesn’t guarantee any service level.

Finally, the developers note that “the application is built with Ruby on Rails and we use some Ajax to make things smooth and enjoyable.” It is not only smooth and enjoyable, it is also free and useful. Big round of applause for Montastic.