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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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  • fmonit.com will come soon. Maybe this is a good opportunity for you.. Commented Jul 12, 2013 at 13:18
  • I know about server-monitoring.online-domain-tools.com that allows 1-minute checks and it allows you to set complex rules on the response of the webpage. It shows response times for individual checks but it does not alert in case of slow response times. Commented Mar 5, 2015 at 10:56

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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. Commented Oct 20, 2011 at 17:19
  • Their paid plan offers 1 minute intervals now. Commented Sep 8, 2015 at 21:15
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https://uptimerobot.com/ offers a free plan with 5 minute interval checking, with one-minute interval checks on their paid plans.

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.

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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 Commented Apr 30, 2011 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 Commented Apr 30, 2011 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. Commented Apr 30, 2011 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.) Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 12:55
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    @siliconpi Thanks – corrected my answer. uptimerobot.com is one worth checking out if you're looking for a free offering. Commented Aug 8, 2016 at 10:57
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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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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. Commented Aug 17, 2011 at 2:31

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