Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : Free uptime monitoring service

[sallam]

Greetings everyone!

Do you know of any free uptime monitoring service? I mean real free, not demos or 30-day trials..?
Today I found out about pingdom.com , they offer free accounts, but you get to monitor only 1 domain or IP. I'm amazed that their free account allows you to monitor your domain/IP in 1 minute intervals. I didn't see any free service that allows 1-minute monitoring. Hyperspin does that, but only for a 15-day trial. If you know of any other such free service, please share.

Not only they monitor your domain, they also give you detailed response time reports. They load your domain from 10 locations:

1. Montreal, Canada
2. London, UK
3. Houston 3, TX
4. Tampa, FL
5. Madrid, Spain
6. Las Vegas, NV
7. Zurich, Switzerland
8. Phoenix, AZ
9. Falkenberg, Sweden
10. Portland, OR

Your reports details your site's response time from each of those locations, plus the average response time.

I thought I'd share this fantastic free service. Please share your own too, if its free!

[jcarney1987]

Are you a Linux administrator? If yes then paying these people will cost you more than you have to pay if you ever decide to monitor more.. As I said on another post here at WHT you can have a monitoring server for 5.95+ a month. I've found cheap VPS that can easily handle this at burst.net and mrnerd.com.

This is what you do.

Buy your VPS.
Update and configure your vps including a mail server.
Setup monitoring Email address.
Download and install Nagios
Configure contact email to your email and maybe CC that message to your cell phone (555-555-5555@yourcellservice.com).

This will give you a stand alone dedicated server and its cheap. You can buy another one offsite to monitor each other as well for redundant monitoring. This will allow you to monitor as many websites, servers, routers, switches, or what ever you find that you can configure with it with lots and lots of plugins and addons.

If you spend more for the VPS you can even build it into a offsite DNS server, Backup Server, and many more. Its your server, user your ideas to do as you wish. But keeping it a dedicated monitoring system is still best. But its very flexible setup.

So sure 1 free account is nice but for a few extra $$ you can have some much more.

That is my thoughts.

[kpmedia]

I use SiteUptime (free=limited, better for pay), and then also run my own redundant monitoring, complete with SMS to alert my phone on the failure of important sites and servers.

I'll be honest with you: it's NOT as easy to do as some people make it out to be.

Something as basic as "install Nagios" can be a chore by itself. Setting up monitoring servers has been one of the more time-consuming, difficult and frustrating things I've had to do in the past year (even more than manually removing malware).

[jcarney1987]

Originally Posted by kpmedia

I'll be honest with you: it's NOT as easy to do as some people make it out to be.

Something as basic as "install Nagios" can be a chore by itself. Setting up monitoring servers has been one of the more time-consuming, difficult and frustrating things I've had to do in the past year (even more than manually removing malware).

Well I will agree/disagree with this. Reason: Nagios turns out to be very simple and easy to use. What makes it complicated documentation makes it confusion and makes it look harder than it really is. Once you figure out the basics of nagios you'll realize how easy it really is. Among the hardest with nagios is creating the templates or server cfg files. But again once you get the hang of it its pretty easy.

I have a project I am working on using community nagios and creating a new frontend tied into mysql for users to register. Basically something like pingdom is doing but there is a bit more development that needs to be done. Probably a year from now it may be release if good progress is made.

[sallam]

I use my PVS to run my own website, that's all. Even if setting up a monitor server is easy, I find it hard to imagine having to buy a second VPS to monitor the first! Its like buying the neighboring house to watch your own from there!

pingdom.com does exactly what I need. All they ask in return is that I login at least once in every 90 days. What a humble price for their great service.

[sallam]

..Besides, if I'm hosting 1000's of sites in my VPS, when one of them is down, doesn't that indicate that all the others are down too?

[jcarney1987]

Originally Posted by sallam

I use my PVS to run my own website, that's all. Even if setting up a monitor server is easy, I find it hard to imagine having to buy a second VPS to monitor the first! Its like buying the neighboring house to watch your own from there!

pingdom.com does exactly what I need. All they ask in return is that I login at least once in every 90 days. What a humble price for their great service.

Yea very true. If you on intend on monitoring one site then I guess the free service suits just fine. Personally I just like control of everything

Originally Posted by sallam

..Besides, if I'm hosting 1000's of sites in my VPS, when one of them is down, doesn't that indicate that all the others are down too?

Technically that is true. There are a few things that can change that but probably rare. I don't monitor individual websites, I monitor service ports, server loads, memory, how many users logged into the system. So if your monitoring a server this is where having control comes in handle.

[p0go]

sallam,

Yes pingdom is a great service and a great company. We've used them plenty of times and to be honest, it's worth it to upgrade from their free package to there paid packages if needed and you enjoy it. We use their paid services for one of our businesses operation and love the service. They've also been around for awhile now, and not something new. They are also pretty popular here at this community for monitoring services.


There is not many free services that are not linked with trials or have a very tight limit, like take Pingdom for example, there free account is has tight limits on what is available and provided to you, only allowing one DOMAIN or IP to be monitored, with limited notification permissions. As were if you were on a paid package you get much more features and permissions, along with more room to add more monitors on your websites, or servers.

Now don't get me wrong, I mean you can search on google and find tons of useable monitoring services that offer a free account that's not only a trial setup, I've searched myself for a buddy of mine and came up with alot. But to be honest, I would never base my results off of just one setup monitoring something that's important or in any case, that if it needs to be monitored, I wouldn't just have one place monitoring or just one system or script, like how I mentioned a brand of our business uses pingdom for monitoring some of the servers needed (30 servers).... but also Pingdom is not the only place we use for monitoring, it's always good to have different places monitoring as Pingdom is not always 100% correct we have discovered where they have notified us of downtime stating that a server was offline and we did a check into it and it never had a glimpse of downtime or error running in, also double checked with our other systems and nothing came up, sometimes Pingdom gets these little glitches or I believe if one place comes up and say's its down for more then 1 check, they report that it's down (sometimes), Please don't quote me on this though as this could not be the same for everyone but I have read some comments where people have came across the same problem and issue as us and was wondering about it also...

I've noticed using your own system or developing your own type of monitoring always works the best which is what we have done for business-wide monitoring requirements, we run our own in-house monitoring system on a private and off-site network, on our own fail-safe redundant monitoring gear, which some are even virtual machines. So far, in the past 16 months of using this system we have developed, it has been 100% correct on every outage, issue, or downtime of a process, but we went in more detail with this also allowing it to monitor more then just the server itself, and such but to monitor services running on the server and more.


Nagios - have you ever heard of this? I would check into this, it's a useful tool to use and a good monitoring solution to run on your servers to overall monitor and overlook your servers. We have used this in the past, and I use this on a personal level while me and my buddy, were in development stages of our new project of our own monitoring tool not business related.

Theres plenty of things and options for you to choose, but I would suggest that if it's needing to be monitored and you need them notifications and constant on-point, fast monitoring intervals, and quick notifications, I would invest the extra couple bucks into the premium/paid packages for monitoring tools so you can ensure you have a good system and reliable system, as it's always worth it if needed.

These systems, tools, and such are not hard to develop your self, I mean shoot, we developed a temp system just to overall monitor mine and my buddy (partner in this little project in development) gear running for this project in the mean-time of development stages of this project, and it's just in some hours worth of PHP code, and a few different small low-end virtual private servers (VPS).

The project we are working on though is going to be a cloud based monitoring system that will offer more then common offerings from providers, and it will become a community place is the whole idea and concept of it, allowing its registered members to have free service (FREE- unless your not a registered member) and you become apart of the 'project' later on, the 'company', i guess you could say, as with the direction we are going in, and the success with the sponsors and investors we have been getting it's doing well. But, I highly recommend you look into different options for monitoring instead of relying on just one place like Pingdom to handle everything, or even try putting together or finding someone that's good with PHP to develop something for you, it's not hard and even if your not good with PHP, it shouldn't cost you no more then about $25-45 bucks to put a nice little script/system together that you could run on your own to monitor your own servers and websites to ensure they are up, and also be able to notify you via email, sms, etc. We are currently working on to even be able to notify Facebook and Twitter, currently working on that part now with their APIs, and developing the FB app that if you add it to your profile you can manage the "social settings" and it would notify you in a comment on your wall, or in a message, along with a FB account posting notifications, and announcements there for people on FB to follow along with it, it's doing well so far, keep intouch I've mentioned it on here a few times and I will release a welcome on the final grand opening launch.


Thanks for your comments on Pingdom though, I actually didn't even know the free account monitors from that many locations or even offers that, that the domain/IP monitored is checked from that many locations on the free account, or even the paid account. I thought it was only about 4-5 locations, cool.

[613websites]

Originally Posted by sallam

pingdom.com does exactly what I need. All they ask in return is that I login at least once in every 90 days. What a humble price for their great service.

Totally agree! Really great/useful site...can't recommend them enough

[dclardy]

Uptime Robot is nice for this.

[SerayaHost]

+1 for uptimerobot..

[Flapadar]

Originally Posted by jcarney1987

Are you a Linux administrator? If yes then paying these people will cost you more than you have to pay if you ever decide to monitor more.. As I said on another post here at WHT you can have a monitoring server for 5.95+ a month. I've found cheap VPS that can easily handle this at burst.net and mrnerd.com.

What happens if you start getting intermittent connectivity issues with a certain part of the world?