Hi guys,
Just wondering,do you use a 3rd party monitoring service or you do it by yourself to keep your website up always?

I use a web host that guarantees 99.5% uptime and check on my website each morning when I sign on....

In my opinion a web monitoring service is a waste of money unless you do your own hosting.

Here is a site that offers free monitoring.
http://www.siteuptime.com/

I use siteuptime's free service. It check your site every half hour, and notifies you if/when it goes down, then when it comes back up again.

I use whatsupgold 7 to monitor our 3 websites, it runs off my puter and if my site goes down, i have it set to automatically open a trouble ticket to my hosting company

Its depend on the services you need if you're on a dedicated (managed) server paid services i guess its better they monitor you system back it up daily upgrade your kernel if you're not familiar with all that.
you can check http://www.fastservermanagement.com/

if you're on webhosting then i guess your provider shall update you with the status of you host by a control panel or email notification.

Regards,

NetCraft is a good tool to monitor web site's uptime and also determine the operating system and some other server information.