Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

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.

If your hosting provider isn’t on the fast lane as far as DNS changes are concerned and you don’t have the time to wait for them, you can always resort to a free DNS hosting service like XName. You can host your primary and secondary name servers with XName for free.

Test a page multiple times to get an idea if it loads easily or lets the viewer wait. WebWait is a website timer. Use WebWait to benchmark your website or test the speed of your web connection. It takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading.

Get DNS info for any domain on Robtex.com. Find out what other sites share a server, whois info, blacklists and more.