Greetings all! new member here.

How do you know your website is up and running? what tools or scripts or services are there that you guys recommend? free / cheap is obviously preferred!

I've googled for whats out there, i'm more interested in real world usage success stories.

Hello there.
I'm new on forum aswell :O. Where I'm working we are using Nagios for all servers. It watches hosts and services [ping, dns, pop, smtp and many more] and it's free on open source licence. I hope this will help you.

alertra.com is pretty good, only give 1 month free though.