How do you freelancers make sure that your websites are not down?

Monitoring?

@stop
My bad. Monitoring is the obvious answer.

What I really wanted to know is what monitoring programs are the best in your experience and how do you restart them (the webservers)?

Via own scripts or are there really amazing programs that can take care of that automation without you having to glimpse every hour over the websites?

I answer the phone.

I wrote a monitoring system myself. Not insanely fancy but it does what I need!

And as for restarting, I do that myself when needed but I've had that once in years now 😄

Maybe take a look at Monit for automatic restarts on crash?

this is the way to do it

Honestly I use puppet to manage such things, after a while I wrote my own modules to handle custom systems.

@stonestorm puppet?? Nani

I recently started monitoring them. Using Uptime Robot for now. It’s notification system is very helpful for me.