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I need a website monitoring service to make sure my app is not only up but also responsive. Pingdom is great, but just so expensive. Is there anything like it but more affordable?

UPDATE: I'd like 1 minute interval checks at least. By responsive, I'd like to know stats on the response times of the individual checks and an SMS alert maybe if the responsive stays below a threshold for a certain amount of time.

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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

http://aremysitesup.com/ offers a free plan with 15 minute interval checking, or a paid plan (from $5.42/month) for 5 minute interval checking.

If you're just monitoring one site, pingdom's free account offers 1-minute interval checking -- you just need to login once every 90 days to keep it alive: https://www.pingdom.com/signup/free/ (If you're monitoring more than one site, their prices are pretty reasonable, in my opinion.)

If you're really concerned with uptime you might also like to consider DNS hosting with a DNS failover service, which monitors your site every 2 to 4 minutes and updates your DNS to point to a backup server should it find that your primary server is down. Of course, this means you need to pay for a backup server, and that you need to mirror the content between the two servers.

(I'm not affiliated with any of these services, though I've used all of them for different projects.)

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I'll credit you with the best answer, even though the whole point of the question was an "alternative to pingdom" and you suggested pingdom :). They are fairly expensive though, even their $39.95/mo plan only gives you 200 SMSes and then you have to pay $0.35-0.45 EACH SMS: pingdom.com/services/extraservices – at01 Apr 30 '11 at 0:32
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Thanks. Fair comment about having to pay extra for SMS -- that does seem expensive once you go over 200 alerts. If my sites were going down more than 200 times a month, though, I'd probably spend the money on better hosting instead of uptime reporting. Another option might be to use an open source self-hosted reporting system, like Nagios Core: nagios.com/products/nagioscore – Nick Apr 30 '11 at 8:06
Oh -- I didn't realise it was 200 texts on signup, not 200 a month. That does seem a little odd. Probably best to rely on their email reporting and turn push email on, perhaps. – Nick Apr 30 '11 at 8:15
Even so, figure you consume 5 SMS messages per event, that's still 40 events worth on signup. Even if you had an outage every month, that's more than three years' worth. And an unplanned outage every month seems...too high. (For planned outages you use the API to pause monitoring.) – T.J. Crowder Feb 15 '12 at 12:55
up vote 3 down vote

Check into UptimeRobot http://www.uptimerobot.com It's free, offers HTTP and ping monitoring every 5 minutes with email, text and RSS notifications. To my soon to be former webhost's chagrin, it's very reliable with uptime monitoring logs and past event tracking.

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And UptimeRobot has just added an API, making it very useful indeed. – Ciaran Oct 20 '11 at 17:19
up vote 1 down vote

mon.itor.us and SiteUptime have free/ad-supported plans. Check are only at 30-minute intervals however.

They both have plan upgrades which measure at 5 minute intervals and are cheaper than Pingdom, so you might find a reasonable cost/benefit trade-off.

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up vote 1 down vote

I use was it up (free), and they've always seemed to catch my downtime pretty quickly. I'm going to pump the emails into PagerDuty (not free) to send SMSes as soon as I get a chance.

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Love the simplicity, but the faq shows it's 5 minute intervals. – at01 Aug 17 '11 at 2:31

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