At it’s core, Stella is a web developer’s tool for monitoring and debugging websites and applications. Stella will monitor your website or apps for slowdowns and outages.  Add that together with the handy bookmarklet and it has never been easier to check up on website performance.

After running the free test on mitchelaneous.com, I got the result: "Not bad. It’s on par with most sites". My response time was 927 milliseconds and my page size was 50.77 KB.

The free plan will allow you to have 1 public monitor and unlimited email notifications on or about your website (and checks it every 10 minutes).  If you need more monitors, then you can sign up for one of the monthly billing options. 

Overall, I would say you should at least play with Stella and see if it is a service you would like to use.

You can set the monitoring tools to check the web site in question you wish to monitor in intervals ranging from 5 to 60 minutes or above.

If the worst might happen, and you need to be told, here are the various ways they can alert you to trouble:

• E-mail
• RSS
• SMS Messages

For those of you just wanting to beta test the service; when you first sign up, you are given a fully functional, 15-day trial account. At the end of 15 days, your account will be downgraded to free unless you upgrade to either Standard or Premium account.

Check out the screenshots, then give them a shot at Site24x7.com.

Here are a few other things we covered on the latest episode of the podcast:

• An Interview with Julien Szemere of Wormly.com!
• Five Web Development Tools of the Trade!
• Lori – a Firefox Extension for Hosting Gurus!
• A Link to Resize your Web Site to Any Size at All!
• Wild and Wacky Web Hosting Edu-tainment!

+ Download and Listen to the Web Hosting Show – Episode 105!