One more bleg: Site Uptime Services?

Posted by Screenack on April 5, 2010 at 5:07pm

Thanks much, all, for your input on web hosts you like. I have one more bleg: site uptime services you like. This is a surprisingly expensive service and I'd be curious about positive experiences you have had.

I am using Site Uptime's one free account, which is great, but their first level of paid service $5/month 3 sites or $60 a year seems steep to me.

Thanks again!

Comments

BasicState.com

Posted by regi.bradley on April 5, 2010 at 5:20pm

I use BasicState.com - it's free for HTTP/HTTPS checks every 15 minutes. The web interface is a little confusing but considering it's free and it works I can't complain.

The winner is...

Posted by Screenack on April 13, 2010 at 2:40am

Well, I'm not convinced this is final, but basic state, for free, does provide me with more meaningful metrics then I expected, and I like the event-based pricing model. That might be the most fair yet. The only rub is that basicstate.com does not monitor subdomains, i.e., site.com/subsite

Thanks!

If you're feeling adventurous...

Posted by afreeman on April 5, 2010 at 7:03pm

There are free tools available if you're into the DIY thing:

http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/docs/about.html

Interesting

Posted by Screenack on April 5, 2010 at 7:18pm

I can do a simple "roll my own" web site checker with wget/cron, but the reason I haven't is that service needs to be on a reliable server, or so it seems to me. Is this a merited concern? I guess this is why these sites charge so much for co-located redundancy?

(I originally typed "collated redundancy" which describes a lot of temp jobs I held in my youth.)

It All Depends (as usual)

Posted by afreeman on April 6, 2010 at 5:13am

I guess it depends on how paranoid you are and what the consequences are of you not finding out a site's down until some undetermined time after the fact.

Eye balls

Posted by tarvid on April 6, 2010 at 5:54am

Isn't the most expensive part the eye balls of someone who can do something about it when it's down?

Yes

Posted by Screenack on April 6, 2010 at 10:39am

Rephrased; It's immeasurably valuable when I call my client to say "site's down." However, my sites go down rarely (some, never) so, I'm not clear on what a good cost is for this service, and I am open to other services.

Here's an interesting review of the matter. My static sites never go down. Drupal or WordPress (a.k.a., LAMP) sites; rarely. My .NET sites? More often than I'd like.

Thanks all!

WasItUp.com

Posted by joeebel on April 14, 2010 at 3:06pm

Have you tried http://wasitup.com? It's free and checks every ten minutes. Nothing fancy, just email reports. I've been watching my sites go unavailable for a few minutes during backups. Interesting...

Uptime Widget module

Posted by lolandese on January 7, 2013 at 4:21pm

A D7 module has just been released called Uptime Widget. It uses the third party service UptimeRobot.com.

The widget style (color) is easily modified through CSS. It is a block, so visibility can be set based on page, role, content type and theme.

FYI: I ultimately went with

Posted by Screenack on January 7, 2013 at 4:34pm

FYI: I ultimately went with Pingdom. Not cheap, but I've kept my clients happy when I notify them of an issue and that "we're on it." I also use the performance stats to evaluate various hosting vendors or when assessing site performance.