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Uptime Robot 'Pro'
This just popped into my inbox:
Hi, First of all, thanks so much for using Uptime Robot and hoping that it is helping for a better uptime. Uptime Robot, a project that have started out of curiosity 5+ years ago, has now grown so much. Since the last year, we are a full-time team working on it, providing fast support and trying very hard to keep the service simple, solid and modern. In order to guarantee its future and keep offering a great monitoring experience, it became clear that Pro Plan is the way to go. The Free Plan is still here The Free Plan of "50 monitors checked every 5 minutes" (which you are currently using) is still here and stays untouched. The Pro Plan Faster downtime detection and -optional- more monitors. The Pro Plan is a very budget-friendly premium monitoring plan which comes with 3 additional features: - 1-minute checking intervals for faster downtime detection - (Optional) more monitors - 1 year of log retention You can check the pricing and purchase by logging-in + clicking the "Upgrade" link that can be found in the header or inside the "My Settings" page. Additionally, you'll see that there is now a "Pro SMS" feature which supports almost any mobile provider and can be used by purchasing SMS credits from the "My Settings" page (one-time credits come with each Pro Plan to experience it). 20% discount for early adopters The Pro Plan pricing is currently 20% discounted for early adopters. By purchasing now, you'll be locking the discount rate for future renewals and upgrades. Please let us know any questions you may have and we'll be very happy to help. And, feel free to share your thoughts regarding the Pro Plan in this blog post. Have a great day, Uptime Robot
No word yet as to whether the pro version will actually detect downtime.
Comments
I'd like to see the free version working as intended before I'd be prepared to hand over any money.
It is strange, really...
I read so many complaints from others about UptimeRobot not being good in what it's supposed to do.
My experience, on the other hand, is not that bad. I monitor 15 servers with UptimeRobot (additionally, I use Pingdom and a custom solution) and while you may argue that Pingdom and my custom solution are shit too, the results do not differ very much. I receive way more false positives with Pingdom and there has not been a single downtime that I am aware of which has not been caught by UptimeRobot within the 5min. timeframe.
So, mmh, I really don't know what to think.
I'm assuming they have a truckload of 'subscribers' on the free plan who never complain, so they mistakenly believe they have a service worth paying for.
What timing. I have been working overtime on in-house monitoring options (an "UptimeRobot killer") so that I can get notifications (including some funky webhooks) sooner than what they offer.
Maybe.. I've never complained about the service directly to themselves, it's free so I learnt my lesson and moved on.
Same here, there are so many players in the market at affordable prices, it's not worth wasting your time complaining to them. Just try's, then move onto the next.
I've never had any problems with UptimeRobot. Not going to pay for it though.
Been using the UptimeRobot for a while now, no problems so far. Not sure if the 'pro' features are worth the price though.
As I've quite the interest in uptime monitors, I'd like to ask both you folks; when you say you've had no problems, have you used Uptime Robot in conjunction with other uptime monitors in order to test it's accuracy in reporting downtime?
Uptimerobot gives way too many false positives. I switched to https://updown.io/ and it's awesome.
Read my post above? ;-)
I would pay if they offered public reporting natively.
I did, that's why I only quoted the guys who didn't go into detail.
Ever thought of signing up for a trial plan with one of the better regarded monitoring providers to see how UR/Pingdom/your custom solution stack up?
I'm using UptimeRobot to monitor about 10 servers and am pretty happy. They have reported every downtime i am aware of and there haven't been any false positives.
I would do that right away, but - honestly said - I fear the cost of a paid service (none of my projects is that important). But if you have a good recommandation for me (with a trial plan), then I will happily compare the reliability!
Monitis do a 15 day free trial, and they have highly customisable plans so you pretty much only pay for what you need.
If you don't need checks too frequently, they have a completely free plan at monitor.us, which is limited to checks from 2 geographic locations and 1 check every 30 minutes.
Uptime Robot delivers, 5 servers and no complaints.
I've been using them for a while and I haven't had any issues. Been debating on setting Nagios up on one of my boxes as a backup.
Same question as I posed above, if you wouldn't mind; have you run side-by-side comparisons with other monitoring tools to ensure UR is catching all your downtime?
Haven't checked tbh.
So how do you know the service is good?
I actually have, for about a year, and .... they are not that bad, IMHO
They catch the majority downtimes (My main complaint occurred about 5 months back when they were definitely having some issues; I commented about it in a thread here at LET)
The 5 minute check can make it lag behind other freemium and self-hosted tools. So you can have an outage that comes and goes in a minute that might go unnoticed. (But purists might refer to that as "flapping" anyway). Edit: But in all fairness, I think that their algorithm for confirming an outage is really what may cause the (usually) slight delay in "server down" notification. I have not experienced many false positives.
Also, their check "engines" seem to all be in Dallas. So even though they do multi-site distributed monitoring, if anything went screwy with the Dallas route to the endpoint being checked, it didn't act right IMHO. (They have since added more remote monitors, but the engines are still in Dallas according to their location page.)
For me, their FREE offering has been reliable enough (if not the "fastest") in responding, since the "fix" from a few months back
Compared to remote monitoring via: Port-Monitor site, Monit, Uptime, PHPServerMon, Zabbix, custom Bash scripts, etc
The only times I've gotten notifications has been when I have taken the server down or there have been problems on the node. Granted, there could be network issues or whatever that last less than 5 minutes, but I get notifications almost instantly in the event of downtime.
Everyone has different metrics for what determines "good."
Well, I just turned off 6 of my servers and within 5mins., I received downtime notifications from UptimeRobot. I turned them back on and, again within 5mins., the corresponding uptime notifications arrived. I know that does not tell me much about the reliability throughout the day, but it confirms my general experience with the service. I really don't know why it does not work fine for some. But I will do the test with additional services and see...
As a hobbyist, the pro plan is still too expensive for me. I'd be ok with a reduced number of checks (websites==checks?) for less money. I think updown.io is going in a better direction price-wise.
On a site note, I always wondered why something as simple as uptime monitoring has to be that expensive. I'm wondering what the pricing of Constellix will be if it ever comes out of beta. Kinda like their traceroute email once a check fails.
Nope. That's probably why there hasn't been any problems. But whenever UptimeRobot says something's down, it's down. I have not noticed a case when server has gone down and it has not noticed it.
Nice find. I have also had far too many false positives over the last...at least 2 years, if not 3. Their ping test is fine, http test fails a lot for me while I can actively browse the site in question.
A couple notes on Uptime Robot:
Hi all, adrien here from updown.io
I found my product on this forum and was happy to see the comments
I haven't experienced much issue with uptimerobot but I haven't tried for long. I guess their freemium model prevents them from working on the stability of the thing as much as they should
But hey, it's free so the value is great.
Good necro'ing bro.