Simple web services that are easy to use is something that we all take for granted. A lot of apps out there try to do too much, and end up not doing much at all for many users. Montastic, a website monitoring service, is not one of these apps.

I’ve been using Montastic ever since the launch of BuzzShout, and it’s definitely a reliable tool that just works. You simply add the website that you want monitored, and it will ping it (with the minimum interval being 10 minutes), and will alert you via RSS, email, or Yahoo Widget with the status of your site. I’ve found it a lifesaver of a tool during the times when one of DreamHost’s servers go down–I’m usually the first to alert them about it when I see the Montastic status.

And, that’s about all the functionality that Montastic brings to the table. The key is they do it, and they do it well. The service is totally free, and the people behind Montastic, Metadot, actually rely on the service themselves for their sites. The effort behind Montastic is all done in goodwill and in the spirit of sharing useful applications, which is a breath of fresh air amidst other apps that only jockey their position for financial gain.

Montastic is built with Ruby on Rails and AJAX.