Monitoring Website Uptime
Many people rely on server logs to monitor uptime or will ping a server from an in-house location. Unfortunately, this is not adequate as there can be many reasons a website is unavailable.
In shared hosting environments* your bandwidth and availability is potentially at the mercy of dozens of other websites that may or may not be commercial in nature. However, even in dedicated hosting environments outages occur, modems to go off line, routers fail, and networks go down, making it important to monitor availability regardless of your environment. (more)