Your site’s uptime is critical. If your site crashes, you want to know right away. While we here at Palladium Hosting respond immediately to network issues, a problem may be isolated to your site, and in that case, you’ll want to know. There are many companies out there that can provide that service for you.

One such company is Alertra, which offers affordable monitoring for your website, FTP, SMTP, and POP networks, among many others. They also offer a free 30-day trial, allowing you to try before you by. You can get alerts sent to your e-mail, IM, or cell phone.

Another company is SiteUptime, which offers a free plan, a premium plan for $5 a month, and a platinum plan for $10 a month. The platinum plan offers SMS updates, according to their Web site.

Whichever company you choose, if you go with one of these companies, or another one, you’ll know within moments if your site goes down, and that will allow you to react appropriately. As the site administrator, you want to know what’s going on with your site at any given moment, and monitoring sites such as this gives you the knowledge you want and need.