I once wrote about a site that can help you check if your site is down or up in case you can’t access it. This is important to know if you’re the only one having the problem or there are others having the same problem. One of the most common thing that could be the reason is your ISP is blocking the connection to the website. If you guys missed the post, read my last post titled “How to check if your site is down”

Yesterday, I got a comment from someone on that post. He/she is using the nick isthatsitedown and apparently he/she is promoting his own service of checking if your site or blog is really down or it’s just a problem that you’re having and no one else is experiencing it. The service is called Is that site down which you can check out at http://isthatsitedown.com/

comment1

What do I think on the website ?

itsd1

The interface is simple and straight forward. There’s no hanky panky stuff on the website, loads very fast and gives you an accurate result. You just need to type the URL of the site you want to check whether it’s down or not, and just click the “Down” button. It will give you the result in a second. I did a test on mine and here’s the result.

itsd2

itsd3

Just nice and simple. It also gave me the IP address of the hosting. Let’s do another test.

This is time I’m using a bogus URL just to test if it gives an accurate result. Well, you can see it for yourself.

itsd4

And the author also included a few other features on the site.

  • sharing the information using to social bookmarking
  • a contact option in case you want to notify them their site is down
  • a mobile version for the service in case you’re using a mobile phone on 3Gor GPRS connection
  • a blog that I don’t really know the purpose yet, maybe to track the changes made to the site.

What I hope the site have in the future

  • Instead of checking manually, there’s an option where we can monitor our site to see if it’s down or not. If it’s down, a notification email will be automatically sent to our email address.
  • Add more portability to it other than email, it can send to our mobile (might be expensive) or at least sent to our twitter notifying us that the site is down.
  • the DOWN button is not really noticeable. I know the idea is to make it blend with the site but I found it was annoying to figure out where to click. I know I always can hit ENTER to submit the data but it’s always nice to make the button more outstanding so the first timers know where to click.

That’s all. Have fun using the free service ! :grin: