Great Uptime Alerting and Monitoring - updown.io

Since Pingdom discontinued offering a free tier of monitoring. So about a year ago I found myself on the hunt for a new one. So for the past year I have been using and am more than satisfied with updown.io.

While they are a paid service new users receive 100k credits for free. This is a massive amount of credits for small scale usage. For scale, one credit on updown translates to one request (or check) for uptime. So if only using on 1 website this 100k credits can last you a very long time. Out of the box updown will do an health check every 1 minute. Again, for my usage which is a small personal website and one off projects that is total overkill. As such, I have adjusted my interval to run healthchecks every hour. Which, for a single site means free credits will last close to a decade. Since I like this service, I am now using it on three different sites. After about a year of using this service on two sites I still have 3 over years of free credits left. Their pricing is also very reasonable and something I will and plan to pay for whenever my free credits are exhausted.

Some Added Benefits

A single healthcheck (also single credit) with updown checks 8 different locations too (Montreal, Tokyo, Sydney, etc.). So if using a CDN you can check to make sure locales are all distributing correctly and response times are reasonable.

Historical and records are kept so you can get a nice overview of the health of your sites. This information is showcased on a tidy status page like so: status page. This status page may also be configured to point a subdomain. If I wanted status.stephentvedt.com I can easily do so. All it requires is some DNS config with CNAMEs outline at: https://updown.io/public-status

Alerting

All the alerting methods for outages you would expect are available: SMS and Email notifications, of course. The really nice additional integrations of updown are as follows:

• Slack
• Telegram
• Webhooks
• Zapier
• Hit custom API Endpoint

If all the above sounds like a fit for your needs I highly recommend giving updown.io a try!