Once you've gone through the process of building your website, finding a reliable host and getting it all up and running, you will likely want to be sure it's up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

But you probably don't want to spend time every day checking the site to make sure it is working the way it should. After all, you have other more important work to do, right?

Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that you have no control over that can affect your website. You can run into hardware and software failures on your server, which could make your site sluggish or even unavailable.

The solution to making sure your website is up and running without spending a whole bunch of time checking it is to use a website monitoring service. These services will check your site regularly and automatically notify you if the site is down or running slower than it should.

Prices for monitoring services range anywhere from $5 to $60 per month. There are even some services that are free but the paid options offer more features and you can usually check multiple sites with the same service.

Monitoring is not continuous - they generally check your site anywhere from every 3 minutes to every hour. In most cases, the more you pay for the service the more often your site will be checked.

These monitoring services send a request to your website and then check the response time. The requests that are sent are the same requests the average browser makes when someone accesses your site, so the response time tells the monitoring service how good the site is responding to the average visitor.

Most monitoring services have servers in various places around the world so they can gauge how well your website responds to requests from different areas.

If the response code and response time are good, nothing will happen. The monitoring service simply moves on and waits until the next scheduled check. If the response is bad - too long or an error code of some sort - the monitoring service will wait for a few seconds and then check again, using a server from another location.

Depending on the service, there may be 3 or 4 of these checks done before you are alerted. If the service finds a problem, it will alert you in one (or more) of a number of ways.

They can send alerts via email (to one or more addresses) or to your cell phone or pager. You can then contact your hosting company to find out what is wrong and to get the problem fixed.

Some monitoring services can also check other parts of your website such as FTP and email.

Over a longer term, monitoring services can give you a log of the performance of your website. They can tell you things such as how often the site is unavailable every day, week or month. You can use this third-party information to demand better service from your host (or as a basis for deciding to change hosts).