So you’re paying for hosting and wondering if the promised uptime measures against your actual site uptime? If you’re willing to use some of your computer bandwidth downtime, then you might give Pingdom GIGRIB a try, which lets you monitor up to 10 websites for free. I have been using it for the last couple months to check Hmm, tdscripts and just added VTOReality, sites that are located on three different dedicated servers.

This site has been up 99.81% over the last three months with the following uptime/downtime stats:

March 2007 (thus far): 100%
February 2007: 99.9%, 40m
January 2007: 99.39%, 4h 31m
December 2006: 99.96%, 6m

I’m satisfied with these numbers and very happy with our hosting companies, although January was admittedly a bit of a letdown, the overall average is very good. Really anything in the 99.5% and up range is what you should shoot for with your site and hosting. If your hosting companies promises or “guarantees” 100% uptime, now you have access to a free tool that can verify and dispute their claims.

Just register for the site (free), download and run the software. You can then register checking for up to 10 of your sites. Before doing that you can check and see if somebody else is using one of their 10 sites to check yours by using the following format (replace bolded domain.com with the domain):

uptime.pingdom.com/site/month_summary/site_name/domain.com

The application will run as a background process and run test pings to other sites and share the results back. Pingdom offers a commercial service ($9.95/month) if you want to have them monitor your sites without using any of your bandwidth or running their software.

Early this morning I noticed several of Chris Pirillo’s websites were down and dropped him a message on Skype. As of this writing they’re still down. On the main GIGRIB page I see Forbes.com has been down for a couple minutes. Happens to every site.

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• Webmasters: Backups should never be assumed