For the longest time I haven’t really done any official monitoring of my hosted server. However, over the last few months I have become more and more dependent on my server being available 100% of the time. A little over a month ago I got a tip from Andrew, a buddy of mine, that he had just started using a service called Pingdom. I signed up for the 30 day trial and was very impressed with the polish and ease of use of the service. For under $10/month you get the basic service, which allows you to monitor up to 5 different services. It is highly configurable, allowing you to specify how long a service has to be down before notifying you, how many times to re-notify you and many other options. Pingdom can notify you by email or SMS text message. Along with the uptime monitoring they also provide response time monitoring as well. This allows you to see how responsive your site is in a given date range. Here is the average daily response time for this site for the month of June:
As you can see, I need to work on the response time. 
The reporting is great, the service is rock solid, they have a blog where they openly communicate with everyone and they even have an API to get at your data in case you need to do some extra reporting. In my short time using Pingdom I haven’t experienced any issues with the service at all, and I can easily recommend it to anyone who is serious about uptime monitoring.
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