Use Google Docs To Track Your Website’s Uptime

Have a website and want to know the minute your site is down? This simple Google Docs spreadsheet from Digital Inspiration can email you and monitor your website for free.

Although there are website monitoring services that provide this monitoring service and also provide more data analysis, many of them charge for the alerts or set limits for the number of alerts they send you. This website monitoring doc is in your hands and you can set it up very quickly.

To do so, make a copy of the Google Docs spreadsheet. Then change the website URL to your website and the email address to your email. That’s the email you’ll be notified for uptime and downtime.

Then in the Google Docs menu, you’ll need to go to Tools –> Script Editor –> Resources –> Current Script’s Triggers. Under the Run drop-down menu, select “isMySiteDown”, under Events, select “Time-driven”, and then select “Minutes timer” and choose if you want to be notified every minute or every five minutes — for how often you want the website to be checked.

Save the trigger and authorise Google Docs, then re-save. To get the script to run, hit the run triangle play button in the script editor.

For my test, I put in a dummy URL and was notified right away by email of the DNS failure error. Digital Inspiration says that if you know some programming, you can also set up tweets and SMS alerts too. Hit up the link below for more information.

Monitor Your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs [Digital Inspiration]