It’s important to monitor how your blog host provider is performing. You may only have one chance to attract a visitor from a search query or a backlink to your blog and if your site is down temporarily for some reason, chances are they may never retry your link and discover your blog. There are a number of free services which will monitor your site and email or SMS you when it’s down, and back online again. I’ve been using the website monitoring service Montastic for about a year now and I’m quite happy with them. The free plan actually lets you monitor up to three sites with an interval down to every 30 minutes. Each site account also includes an RSS feed.

Of course it doesn’t have to be your blog that you monitor, could be any site you’re interested in. The reason I mention this now is because I’ve noticed that of late my blog host Bluehost isn’t providing the uninterrupted service it used to, so I must contact them and find out why. Here’s a snapshot of email alerts I’ve received over the past week from Montastic. You can see that my blog was down for parts of most days.

I have another site with a different host which I’m also monitoring and it isn’t experiencing anything like this sort of downtime so it’s time to put in a ticket with Bluehost.

So I can recommend Montastic, but other free blog monitoring services were reviewed in a Mashable post back in April.