Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If you need a simple yet versatile FTP program, give Cyberducka try. This Open Source FTP program also handles FTP/TLS (FTP secured over SSL/TLS), SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer), WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning), Amazon S3, Google Storage, Google Docs, Windows Azure and Rackspace Cloud Files. Works with open cloud software from Eucalyptus and OpenStack. You can basically upload, download and synchronize anything from any server.

You can edit any text or binary file on the server in your preferred application, configure CloudFront and Rackspace to distribute your files, browse your Amazon S3 account like your hard disk, convert uploads to Google Docs format and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for image uploads. It also has bookmarking capabilities, advanced SSH features and supports Growl and Mac’s Keychain.

For issues about computer hardware or computer software visit SuperUser.com to ask questions, post answers, or simply browse.

For specific programming problems, software algorithm, software tools commonly used by programmers and matters that are unique to the programming profession, visit StackOverflow.com.

If you have questions about servers, networks, ‘many’ desktop PCs (other than your own), visit ServerFault.com.

If you’re a web designer and you have questions about anything related to web and e-mail design, visit Doctype.com.

With all of these sites, if you have a specific question, it may save you a lot of time if you search first to see if your question has already been answered. Logging in is not required with any of these sites, but with registration you get to offer points to have your questions answered more quickly. These websites are collaboratively edited (like wikipedia), but all edits are tracked.

The Spamhaus Project tracks the internet’s spam senders and spam services and makes available blocklists (free for low usage) to filter your e-mail. Before you set your e-mail servers to use Spamhouse’s blocklists, be sure to check their usage terms to see if you qualify for free use. If you think your IP might actually be on their blocked list, you can check your IP and get info on how to be removed. For a list of the 10 worst ISPs that knowingly cater to spammers, or do nothing to prevent spam, click here.

You can register up to 5 websites for free at AreMy SitesUp.com, which will send you an SMS alert to your cell phone if your site is down. You can add and delete sites with an iPhone app, but more frequent monitoring and more advanced features like RSS checks and Twitter integration required a paid plan.

Google recently announced the importance of load speed when it comes to ranking websites. Measure how fast your site loads with Yahoo!’s YSlow Firefox add-on. Not only does it measure the tim eit takes for your site to load, it will also offer suggestions on how to optimize your site for faster loading speeds.

Your site is up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Or is it? If you want to make sure that your server and the network are up and running, Mon.itor.us, a free website, server and traffic monitoring service can be of help. After signing in with a free account, you get multiple options for monitoring, generating reports, widgets for your websites, statistics, alert feeds and more.

Can your site handle a large increase in traffic? Pylot is a free open source tool for testing performance and scalability of web services. It runs HTTP load tests, which are useful for capacity planning, benchmarking, analysis, and system tuning.

.htaccess is usually easy to configure, but there is also lots of room for errors. You can edit your .htaccess configuration files by hand, or you can use htaccesseditor.com’s .htaccess file editor instead.

Get e-mail notification when your website is down and weekly statistics reports at FreeWebsiteMonitoring. Service promises to check your website every 60 minutes.

What if your site is down and you don’t know about it? Don’t wait till your visitors or customers tell you and sign up with the free website monitoring service Montastic. Montastic checks your site’s server at least 6 to 20 times a day. You can sign up to receive notices by e-mail or RSS.