We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

Above: A few screenshots from the Pingdom control panel.

Pingdom Free has all the features of our paid account types. The only limitation is that you can only monitor one website or server, but that should be enough for a lot of bloggers and hobbyist webmasters out there.

We’re even throwing in 20 SMS alerts for free (you can add more later if you wish to use them), and alerts via email are always free.

In short, this is one heck of a deal. We’re biased, of course, but we suspect you’ll agree.

You can sign up for the Free account on the Pingdom homepage.

Quick facts about Pingdom

Just in case you haven’t heard of it, Pingdom is a service that monitors websites and servers from the Internet and alerts you if there is a problem. It acts like a watchdog, making sure that your website is up and running 24/7.

• You handle all your settings from an online control panel. No need to install anything.
• Tests can be performed as often as every minute.
• Tests are performed from multiple locations on the Internet.
• You can get error alerts via both email and SMS.
• You get access to reports on downtime and response time.
• When an error is detected, Pingdom performs additional tests for you, helping you troubleshoot.

There is much more to the service than the above. For those interested in learning more, have a look at the Pingdom feature tour.

Get a free account

Pingdom is one of the most popular uptime monitoring services in the world and has thousands of customers, including sites like Twitter, Spotify, Last.fm and many others.

If you have a website or blog, why not get yourself a Pingdom account? Let us be your watchdog. We promise to bark if your site goes down!

If you don’t think one check is enough for you, for example if you want to monitor multiple web pages or set up a set of more advanced server checks, then you can of course still use our other paid account types: Pingdom Basic and Pingdom Business.

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Fortunately, there are more affordable (and sometimes even free) alternatives to Photoshop, and I’ll take a look at some very competent ones in this article.

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Web designers don’t have this luxury. There’s always the chance that something, or maybe many things, won’t look or behave the same from browser to browser and from operating system to operating system. It’s easy to make mistakes that can make your website appear strange or annoying to a lot of website visitors.

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