Website downtime doesn’t mean much to many people but it is significantly important especially for commercial webmasters and bloggers who are generating revenue from their websites. Short period downtime means potential revenue loss for webmasters. If the downtime is too long, it will affect and lose loyal followers or subscribers. To reduce website or blog downtime, the most effective way is to monitor it 24-7. Of course it is quite difficult to adopt this measure. There are, nevertheless, various monitoring tools and online services can assist webmasters and bloggers to monitor their sites. These programs will notify users in the event the site is down and will minimize the damage due to downtime. URL Guard is one free and useful website downtime monitoring application that users can try.

With URL Guard, users can set up the monitoring tool from the desktop. This application resides in users’ system tray and guards users’ websites’ url. The application will monitor and check the defined urls on regular intervals if the websites are still working. In the event the sites are down, URL Guard will prompt users with notification or email alert.

URL Guard has released its latest update which can be downloaded via the link here. The new features in this 0.3 release include: –

  • Chains and urls can be added via the user interface
  • Configuration settings can be edited via the user interface
  • Email can be sent via applications if the guarded url goes offline
  • Button are available for pre-filling google smtp mail server settings

Bug fixes:

  • alert pops up only if site goes down instead of popping up every minute

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Status screenshot

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Configuration screenshot