Uptime Robot, a free website uptime monitor service, that was built by me & Daniel Rimille of SSLmatic few weeks ago has some fresh features.

But before that, thanks very much to everyone who supports the service by using it, sending us suggestions, tweeting, etc.

Uptime Robot has added 2 new features today:

• keyword checking
• uptime alerts via RSS

which will enable you to monitor your websites in a more flexible way.

Keyword Checking

Now you can set Uptime Robot to check if your website contains (or doesn't contain) a keyword you define.

It is possible to find many creative uses of this feature like:

• finding out if there is a database connection problem (set the keyword that your website displays when a db problem occurs)
• detect if a module of your website word or not by setting a keyword from that module (like the calendar in a webpage)
• & much more..

RSS Alerts

Well, RSS alerts is nothing creative. The service instantly updates your special feed when there is an alert.

But, it is now possible build desktop notifiers & more using these feed URLs.

P.S. Announcing every new feature from WRD is definitely not the plan. However, it can be a good idea to share milestones considering most WRD readers are already users of Uptime Robot.

Uptime is a pretty important factor for the success of a website which directly effects the number of visitors, visitor loyalty, search engine positions & more.

Here is a lovely free service which is created by me & Daniel Rimille of SSLmatic to minimize downtime.

Uptime Robot is a totally free service which monitors your websites every 5 minutes & alerts you if they go down.

It allows you to monitor up to 50 websites & alerts can be received via e-mail or SMS (Twitter & RSS coming soon).

You can add multiple alert contacts to notify multiple users in case of a downtime.

It is possible to monitor both http & https addresses which is pretty important to check if the SSL certificate installed functions correctly.

The service has a simple & fully Ajaxed interface for a faster usage.

P.S. Uptime Robot will hopefully get mature within a short time. But during that period, if you're looking for a more professional service, you may want to check paid ones like Pingdom, SiteUptime, AreMySitesUp…

Upcoming features

• RSS & Twitter alerts
• keyword checking in websites monitored (testing)
• mobile version
• monitoring from multiple locations (we may need your help, will be sharing more details later)

Follow at Twitter for updates, support..

We'll be updating you via @uptimerobot Twitter user for new features, improvements, etc. Also, feel free to contact us from there for support, feature requests, etc.

A little story of Uptime Robot:

I'm sharing a little office with Daniel Rimille of SSLmatic which we're building a complicated web application for a while.

The application is something totally different from Uptime Robot but it needed to monitor websites/IPs it worked with & we created a module for this which worked awesome.

It was my idea to convert this module into a website uptime monitoring service.

Daniel was a little uncommitted as he thought this would take much time & we would be missing our schedule for the application we're building. I thought this was an opportunity to see how it would scale, help us improve ourselves in means of usability, handling support requests, etc.

And I claimed to build it in only 2 days, had a bet (lost a dinner), but completed in 4 days. It took 8 extra days for us both to polish it & here it is.

We loved what we created & will be updating/improving Uptime Robot frequently as there are so many similarities with what we're already building.

Mr Uptime is one of the Firefox plugins that I use and love.

Everybody has an experience with websites being unreachable because of web hosting or technical problems. After that, we may forget to check that website again or spend so much time to see whether it is online or not.

Mr Uptime simply informs the user when an unreachable website becomes reachable again.

Usage is also simple. When a website in unreachable at the time you’re trying to browse, a small menu appears which helps you to add the website to the watchlist with 1 click. Another nice feature is watching a website for a text parameter to appear too. If that text appears on the website Mr Uptime warns you.