Uptime Robot

by DLion • 13 years ago

181 99 13 years ago

tuananh• 13 years ago

already better than Free pingdom.

umami3• 13 years ago

I really like the design and I am trying it with a couple of tests, but it seems to be reporting the opposite of reality. Shows one of my sites as down though it says Keyword Found and it shows the response time, while another one which is really down is shown as up:

http://cl.ly/image/1Y1U3b0z2U0U

http://cl.ly/image/3c0e38312a2W

edit: If it is of any use for debugging, these sites' IDs are: 775909552 (up) and 775909549 (down).

kmfrk2• 13 years ago

Seeing the same here. Maybe the CNAME is tripping it up.

umami3• 13 years ago

Neither domain has a CNAME set up.

umami3• 13 years ago

6 hour update. Now both sites are up but they are both listed as down and with "Keyword Found".

http://cl.ly/image/2L1V1A2K180f

Liking the service a lot by the way! That's why I am reporting what I find.

omegote• 13 years ago

Dammit I was about to start developing something exactly like this... :(

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

So? Do it anyway. Competition stimulates demand and the fact you've got long-lived competitors indicates there's demand already. By coincidence I was literally about to sign up for Pingdom, but I'm going to try these guys out instead. If this had been your service, you'd have just had a new customer right now.

Your success will depend on the quality and efficacy of your marketing.

300bps• 13 years ago

So was I - about 10 years ago. Registered the domain name, started working on the code and then realized there were 100 people doing it already. I mean, seriously, the code to do this is trivial to write.

So I mothballed it for a couple months and then got an unsolicited offer from a guy in Israel to buy the domain for $1,000. Easiest $990 I ever made.

arb993• 13 years ago

There are loads of these kind of service monitoring services out there.

geerlingguy• 13 years ago

It's a fun way to learn about a good variety of things; http and other protocols, distributed architecture, how poor most sites' uptime truly is...

I built https://servercheck.in/ for that reason, and because I wanted cheap 'real' SMS notifications (from a consistent phone number) so I could set a special ringtone on my phone when one of my servers goes down.

davidradcliffe• 13 years ago

This has been around for a while, but seems to have had a facelift recently. Looks much better!

antr• 13 years ago

I already love it, better than Pingdom.

FYI: I'd be willing to pay for SMS alerts (should be "straight forward" with Twilio) or might just work by linking the custom RSS feed to IFTTT...

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

Does you provider offer an email to MMS connection? I know with my cell carrier you can email to (my phone number)@telusblah.com and it'll forward it as an MMS.

cotega• 13 years ago

Here are a list of gateways that might be helpful for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

zackkitzmiller3• 13 years ago

It actually already does support this, as well as twitter and push notifications to iOS via Boxcar.

Just click 'Add Alert Contact'. Also seems pretty granular about which monitors report to what contact.

kmfrk2• 13 years ago

An old classic is http://aremysitesup.com/. You could use that as an alternative.

quaffapint• 13 years ago

Been using this for awhile - its not bloated with a bunch of crud and it just plain works. Not bad for free.

calpaterson• 13 years ago

One benefit of using this over Pingdom: they have a location in outside of the US and Europe (Singapore). If a networking issue causes your site to appear down for Japan, China or India Pingdom won't know.

RafiqM• 13 years ago

I've been using it for about a year and it works well, haven't gotten any false positives yet.

It can do keyword checking as well as standard ping + port connect.

That's about all it does, which is fine by me.

It's free and it works.

gbl08ma• 13 years ago

I have been using this for a while on my servers. For some months, I had Pingdom and Uptime Robot monitor the same server. According to my experience, the latter has less false positives - with Pingdom, it sometimes looked as if it was monitoring its own network congestion, and not the availability of my websites.

Uptime Robot also has an API like Pingdom, but with the added benefit you can monitor up to 50 websites for free. The API allows me to almost never log in to the control panel, as I watch the status using my custom monitoring panels.

mml• 13 years ago

This. False positives are terrible. We monitor google & amazon along with our services. If us, google & amazon all look down, it's a false positive. Not sure why pingdom doesn't do this for us, but whatever.

(fwiw, we're moving off of pingdom too).

pieterhg• 13 years ago

I've used Uptime Robot for a year now and it's awesome.

huskyr2• 13 years ago

Very nice indeed. Just a bit of a pity that they don't support HTTPS :(

zackkitzmiller3• 13 years ago

It seems to support HTTPs.. There's an option for it.

huskyr2• 13 years ago

Where do you see the HTTPS option?

michaelmior2• 13 years ago

I think the comment was that the Uptime Robot website itself isn't served over HTTPS, not that it can't check HTTPS sites.

spindritf• 13 years ago

Right in time for a massive outage.

nathancahill• 13 years ago

Looks like a patchwork of all of the wrapbootstrap themes. Love it.

karlgrz• 13 years ago

Just signed up. Very nice interface, and it supports https for free!

pranayairan• 13 years ago

i am using it from last 6 months, nice service :)

imrehg• 13 years ago

Is it designed for a much larger screen than mine (1280x800 at the moment, the max on my laptop)? I have both horizontal and vertical scroll bars showing up, even when putting it to fullscreen, and some areas still overlap so I cannot see the content (that "sort monitors" section for example).

Otherwise I set up two monitors, look interesting, useful, and well done! Good job!

djm_• 13 years ago

Handy for keeping those free Heroku workers spinning.

eknkc• 13 years ago

Have been using http://copperegg.com probes for a while. I'd suggest them too. They have 15 second checks with various notifications.

smathieu• 13 years ago

+1 for copperegg. Their free plan is much better than uptimerobot. My only comment is that their UI is not overly intuitive, but you don't really have to look at it after you've set it up.

lucasjans• 13 years ago

If you have something critical to monitor, my advice is to stay away from Uptime Robot. I've used them for a couple years along side my Pingdom checks. They often don't deliver notifications. My last notification is ".... resource is down. We'll notify you when it's back up." That was 10 days ago and it was down for a few minutes. I was never notified of it coming back up. This is just typical. It's also common that I never get a notification of a down resource, too.

sleepyhead• 13 years ago

+1. I tried Uptimerobot and Statuscake and had issues with both. Pingdom has on the other hand been 100%. It costs more but it works.

kaeawc• 13 years ago

They seem to be having some odd errors in the signup that prevent it from showing it actually processed. Did get an email asking to verify the account so it sounds like its only a client side problem... seeing an error from jquery validation.

chops• 13 years ago

Kinda-sorta-related: 10 years ago this month, I quit my job to finish my first product: a server monitoring system that I ultimately never launched. I did a little writeup of it earlier this year: http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/esonar-resurrection

So every time I see a post, ad or anything about server monitoring systems, it makes me smile. It's one of those projects that everyone has: "One of these days, I'll work on it."

Theodores• 13 years ago

Me too! I will tell you why...

The off the shelf services will only get you so far, even with keyword search. Sometimes you just have to roll your own.

With a complex ecommerce build you can run into situations where something has gone badly wrong with the pricing, e.g. everything is marked up as on sale, price £0.00. With a roll your own solution you can build an XML tree of the document, go through your HTML tags and put in some rules to make sure that all the prices are greater than zero (for instance).

As for keywords, you want something on the page in the footer, however, that can change. Eventually I ended up using the content between the <noscript> tags as that really did not change (even though they were at the top of the page).

Sending out an SMS is not hard to do, however, now that people have email on the phone it is not really that useful plus your credits can run out.

A 'roll your own' solution with advanced content checks can be used with a standard 'Uptime Robot' type of service. Clients can have the 'Uptime Robot' and manage it themselves, they will get great peace of mind. Meanwhile, the homebrew check can give a developer a heads up on things going wrong before they go wrong (as far as the client is concerned) and pick up on more subtle failings that a client really doesn't need to be told about at odd hours of the night.

Depending on your traffic levels you may also want to remember to take the IP address of your check program out of your stats.

If anyone does want a very simple PHP script to iterate over a list of URL's (and their respective search strings), do the CURL thing and some DOM parsing, with SMS mailout of whatever the 50x fail is then I can find you one.

troels• 13 years ago

Definitely looks nicer than the old design. I just wonder what the heck it's doing at the top of hn?

WA• 13 years ago

Signup sends login credentials over HTTP and not HTTPS. Come on guys, it's 2013. A certificate isn't that expensive anymore.

ollydbg2• 13 years ago

Agreed on this one, HTTPS is not so hard.

jpkeisala• 13 years ago

Off topic: Where can I buy cheap certificate?

michaelmior2• 13 years ago

I've used PositiveSSL certificates from Namecheap[1] successfully in the past. I think $7.95/yr is pretty cheap.

[1] http://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/comodo/positivessl...

perlgeek2• 13 years ago

You can get your SSL certificate signed for free from http://www.startssl.com/ whose CA is included by default in all major browsers.

You just have to be able to receive email to webmaster@yourdomain.tld for that to work.

foodstances• 13 years ago

https://www.cheapssls.com/

richardw• 13 years ago

Not that off-topic since one of the owners sells certs.

http://uptimerobot.com/about

thesis• 13 years ago

http://www.servertastic.com

Chupachupski• 13 years ago

https://globessl.com/

deanpcmad• 13 years ago

I agree. Also one of the guys who started the site runs SSLmatic - http://www.sslmatic.com/

dangrossman5• 13 years ago

The extra dedicated IPs often cost more than the certificate.

farmdawgnation2• 13 years ago

Dedicates IP's aren't required for SSL certs anymore unless you're concerned with old IE's in Enterprise environments. Every modern piece of browser software will send the domain with the TLS handshake. Doesn't look like these guys are targeting the entrenched enterprise, though.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

Genuine questions: why does this service require a login? Why does it require a secure login?

Stealth-2• 13 years ago

You can tie private information, such as your telephone number (for SMS) and various emails to your account that you can associate with alerts on various reminders you set up.

It's bad practice to not use a secure login, because anyone who is sniffing HTTP traffic can see your Uptime Robot username and password in plaintext.

This might not be that bad for this website, but keep in mind how many people use the same email/password for other services, or their email.

antihero• 13 years ago

Still have not received any e-mails.

jqueryin• 13 years ago

I found the same thing. This occurs on forgot password as well. I refreshed to re-signup and it said email already exists. I went to forgot password and it didn't give me any kind of success/error messaging. I opened my Chrome dev tools and could see the AJAX requests being processed but there was an empty response on forgot password. I didn't receive emails for registration or forgot password, so I'm dead in the water.

grannyg00se• 13 years ago

Same here. No feedback at all after clicking Signup. Clicked repeatedly.

dewey• 13 years ago

Looks like the signups are getting processed now, I just got mine and I signed up an hour ago.

tomasien• 13 years ago

My old company made an uptimerobot app a couple years ago, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/uptimerobot/id549265163?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tw.mowd.uptime...

No idea if it still works, assume it does!

ollydbg2• 13 years ago

5 minutes seems to be a pretty wide time interval IMO. If you are serious about uptime, you should check your servers at least every other minute.

Nurdok• 13 years ago

Why do I have to enter a password? Use OpenID so I can login with Google, Twitter, GitHub, Facebook, etc.

jensenbox• 13 years ago

Does signup work for you guys?

I get this in the console:

Uncaught TypeError: Object #<error> has no method 'call' jquery.validate.min.js:2

perlgeek2• 13 years ago

morgo3• 13 years ago

Anyone know of a service like this with good Pager Duty integration? I've previously used Pingdom (which doesn't), and I'd happily make the switch.

jorts• 13 years ago

I work for PagerDuty. What issues are you having with the Pingdom integration? I'm sure some of our other integrations may be of interest: http://www.pagerduty.com/partners/. If you have any questions or need any help feel free to contact me.

morgo3• 13 years ago

I would rather it use the API rather than email.

I think it's also prone to misconfiguration, since you have to explicitly check a box to alert when back up.

It just feels like a second class citizen.

djdclarke• 13 years ago

Come check us out at https://www.statuscake.com - we do have Pagerduty integration via the API (It's not full featured yet to be honest, but I'd say within the next few weeks we'll have an even better connection)

arb993• 13 years ago

I use pingdom tools (with sms notifications), port-monitor.com, think i'll add this to them as well. Never hurts to have a few things checking sites.

One thing this is missing is being able to look for a string on a page. (either checking it is there (like "Loaded"/"Latest Posts"...something to indicate all is working fine), or checking it isn't there (like "error", "database connection error" etc)

oneeyedpigeon• 13 years ago

Doesn't the correct use of HTTP status codes cover 99% of these cases?

cdcarter• 13 years ago

Yes. But this is a testing service, so if some change has made it so in some case the correct status code isn't returned, it's nice to get a fast warning.

arb993• 13 years ago

Always good to confirm what is actually being sent to the client. Never know whats happening inbetween. Some wrong configs and it could be showing the wrong content.

ad1el2or• 13 years ago

Looks like the front-end still needs some polishing. A cursory glance shows a type (My Settings -> Add Alert Contact -> Mobile (SMS) "...that suppor it..." , multiple clicks on the main logo pull up multiple "Loading" messages.

Also, I find it odd that the interface is > 1280px wide(at least it is for me presently). I'm not used to a horizontal scroll on a 13" MBP.

Overall, if it turns up less false positives than Pingdom, I'll be happy.

jdaley• 13 years ago

I set my time zone to +10:00 in settings, and now my web site is "up since -9 hrs, -40 mins".

Other than minor things it's working well so far.

ape4• 13 years ago

cron + wget + mail

Naushad• 13 years ago

Have been using this service since the time id had pretty bad UI, was correct each time with most updates to SMS via Twitter in India. Now, the UI is amazing, though we use it only for few seconds.

JeremyMorgan• 13 years ago

Our company has been using this service for quite a while. Works very well for our multiple websites, spread out over multiple servers/services.

gpmcadam• 13 years ago

We used this at the place I work, but we reached the 50 site limit quickly and were baffled that there was no pay-for-more option.

Anyway, we ended up using StatusCake[1] instead, if anyone is looking for an alternative with more features and less restrictions.

[1] https://www.statuscake.com/

dxchester• 13 years ago

If you want to host your own, ntf is a good open source option: http://code.shutterstock.com/ntf

smallegan2• 13 years ago

Interesting...I created an MVP off of a domain I bought a few years ago called http://www.uptimebot.com

It has been on the back burner for a bit now because I wasn't able to get traction/vistors onto the site...I guess maybe I should figure out what I was doing wrong.

smallegan2• 13 years ago

If anyone checks this out and has any feedback for me I'd be appreciated. You can leave it as a comment or shoot it to the e-mail in my profile.

jbrooksuk• 13 years ago

We've been using Uptime Robot for a couple of years at Blue Bay Travel.

Uptime Robot

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