These are exciting times. Halloween is my favorite holiday, not because I like blood and guts or horror movies or scaring people. It’s when the companies I do work for make $$$$$$. Plus, it’s a fun holiday to just let loose, relax and have fun. Who doesn’t like a costume party? Although the days of throwing parties has passed, I still eagerly anticipate the holiday. I honed my skills as a web developer on a few big Halloween sites.

October pwns. The climate cools to the point where it’s actually enjoyable, leaves turn here in New England, baseball playoffs, and Halloween to name a bit of awesomeness. The lovely October holiday has kept a roof over my head since I graduated from WPI, minus a short stint distracting tweens.

On the eve of October, it’s worth mentioning that if you work with websites that spike ginormously in a short amount of time that up-time is critical. Each minute of downtime can have huge revenue ramifications.

At Fright Catalog I employed a free way of instantly being alerted via txt message if any of our sites were struggling.

Montastic

Montastic is a free service that will constantly ping your domain and alert you via email when there is a problem. It’s rock solid and it just works.

Send a text to my iPhone

It took a bit of research to figure out which email address on AT&T worked with my iPhone but after testing out a few:

• phone#@mmode.com
• phone#@txt.att.com
• phone#@mms.att.com
• phone#@cingularme.com – works, but on it’s way out

I finally found a winner: phone#@txt.att.net (Thanks to Ryan for the update)

It’s not sexy but it will work as an email address that when emailed will send an MMS message to your iPhone.

I’ve seen the recently popular downforeveryoneorjustme.com advertise uptimeparty.com. They’ll let you monitor 1 site for free, but otherwise you pay. Montastic does the same job and it’s free, so it makes a great alternative.

Montastic has helped me sleep easy many-a-night if we hit some up-time snags earlier that day. It could easily be used for your own personal blog as well.