Review: Free Server alerts with www.servermojo.com

Last week I saw a blog entry talking about the free server monitoring at http://www.servermojo.com so I figured I would give it a spin.They offer the following types of alerts:

• dns -- Checks that your nameservers are online and responding to requests
• ping -- Checks that your network is up and your server is responding to pings.
• mysql -- Confirms your database is available and can be connected to-- does NOT authenticate
• http/web basic -- Hits you web server and confirms that it gets a response.
• http with keyword -- Same as http/web basic, but it searches for a particular keyword on your site.

Pretty basic, but effective. Signup was a fairly painless one-step process. (I ran into a JavaScript bug). I opted for the http with keyword option and made a simple probe.cfm page that hits the database and runs a couple ColdFusion commands in a try catch. If there is no error, it outputs "server is up", otherwise the catch outputs "all your base are belong to us". Pros

• Free
• Simple
• Appears to work when I tested it.
• Supports E-mail, Twitter, and Jabber alerts for free
• Has some cool graphs that show the history of your servers uptime as well as each outage.
• Allows multiple monitors on the same account (infinite?)

Cons

• Site is ugly
• Site is slower that cold molasses flowing uphill in January
• They claim to ping you every 15 minutes, but every hour is more like it
• If you want SMS alerts you have to pay for the $20/month

Overall, I think I'm going to give them B-. They get docked mostly for the slow website and slow ping times. I would recommend them if you just want a general purpose monitor for you blog site or something. If you want to monitor a site that actually makes money I would opt for something with a much faster response time. (It usually takes about an hour to get my notification after my site goes down.)