The latest version of Jetpack for WordPress plugin – which packs together several most used plugins and makes sure they all work nicely together – brings in a new one: Jetpack Monitor. Here is a straight forward description from the plugin site:
Jetpack Monitor will keep tabs on your site, and alert you the moment that downtime is detected.
Once activated, one of our servers will start checking your site every five minutes. If it looks like something’s gone awry, we’ll fire off an email notification to the WordPress.com account that Jetpack is connected under.
I think this is brilliant. Every single WordPress site owner I know has at least once looked around for a simple monitoring service that would let him know when the site goes down. There are a few of those around, but all of them are a bit of a hassle to setup – you’ll need to know the terminology and at least have an idea about systems monitoring. With Jetpack Monitor all that is not needed anymore. Simply click the ‘Activate‘ button in the Jetpack settings and you are all done. Beautiful!