Question regarding Basicstate (and seeking alternatives)

Go59954

As some may already know, that basicstate.com are turning their ping services into payed-only but with a small fee, that's going to happen soon (right?), so that means free accounts will stop working unless you pay a small fee once that will keep your monitoring working for so long (not sure though if I understood how their new pricing is).

So:

• Do you know details about their upcoming change in pricing/accounts?
  
• Is there any other service as good? With daily reports sent on email etc?
  

Thanks

drmike

I don't use them but does it matter? There are many free alternatives online.

edit: I don't mind paying for a service but I try not to when I don't have to.

Go59954

@ drmike: Thanks for the suggestion And I actually wanted to find out what others have done? or if they found a similar alternative? It seems not many people use it

Lm85H4gFkh3wk3

basicstate.com has been the best free monitor I've used. Since the announcement of moving to paid service, I've tried uptimerobot, pingdom, and a few others. If I had to go with a free version, I'd use uptimerobot. I'm seriously thinking of just paying for basicstate.com. It just works, has good graphs, and easy to read notification emails.

tortau

I used to used http://mon.itor.us/
But their reports/emails are so colorful that it's hard to read so I ended up unsubscribing and used basicstate.com instead. Pity it's going paid ...

Go59954

Thanks rajprakash same here!
But as I review their announcement, it seems you have to pay per website, each website costs $6/year, not the whole account costs $6/year, did I get it right?! Here's their announcement

SERVICE CHANGES AT BASICSTATE
2011-05-20

Effective 2011-06-01, email alerts will no longer be on a 30 minute enforced delay if an account is not funded. Alerts will revert to the delay set in the control panel by each user. Users who have set a delay under 5 minutes should consider setting the delay at 5 minutes. This gives the system the opportunity to cancel the alert if the automatic retest is successful. Please check your alert settings to allow for the new scheduling.

Concurrent with the return of free immediate alerts, testing charges will be phased in. All accounts that are less than 12 months old will be automatically credited with a further 6 months of testing for free. Accounts older than 12 months will be automatically credited with a further 3 months of testing for free. Thereafter, each month of testing will be charged at two service credits. This is equivalent to 50 cents per month as each credit costs 25 cents. If an account remains unfunded at the end of the grace period, testing and alerts will stop.

New accounts opened after the actual transition date will receive 10 usage credits upon signup. These credits may be used at the discretion of the account holder. For example, it is sufficient for 5 months of monitoring for a single site. It is also sufficient for 1 month of monitoring for 5 sites. Note that host names and user names are not transferable between accounts.

For those who have never purchased credits, the purchase link can be found on the account history page of the control panel. It is identified as purchase usage credits. Credits are sold as a package of 50 credits for $12.50. Payments are processed through Paypal, but a Paypal account is not required.

tortau

Hmm, I'll admit I rarely read these annoucement emails.

In fact, I never noticed my emails from basicstate stopped arriving! The last one arrived on Sept 12 which makes sense because the end of the 3 months credit.

I guess it's time for me to sit down and finish up my own monitoring script. I've been postponing it because there are just so many "free" services for it.

Go59954

There are a few open source monitoring systems that will just need an LEB to run the main script on. Also, NickM just released here in LET an awesome monitoring script which I would like to use. Actually, I have an LEB not in use, but I don't trust it's own uptime But most likely going for test using it.

tortau

Yeah, my version of it is based off scrd and close to what NickM has but I'm doing it in nodeJS for kicks. I figured it's a good excuse to learn a new technology.

Like you, I have quite a number of idle LEBs sitting around but I don't trust putting things on them. But I figured with constant backups propogated to all the servers, if this server does disappear with all my data, I could still recover easily.

And two, I won't roll over and die if the monitoring went down. I mean seriously, it's not like I'll be watching the page update every minute of the day...

AuroraZ

tortau said: In fact, I never noticed my emails from basicstate stopped arriving! The last one arrived on Sept 12 which makes sense because the end of the 3 months credit.

Mine are still coming in. In fact mine arrived at 3:48 pm today.

tortau

"All accounts that are less than 12 months old will be automatically credited with a further 6 months of testing for free. Accounts older than 12 months will be automatically credited with a further 3 months of testing for free.."

So if you signed up this year, you still have 3 months credits to go. Mine was created awhile back

AuroraZ

Mine is like 5 years old lol.

tortau

Odd. Maybe I disabled it ... but I would have remembered. Oh well, lucky you! XD

AuroraZ

Maybe lucky or maybe it dies in a day lol. Usually what happens is I say something then it goes away.

Go59954

@tortau @AuroraZ: then I will be keep using it at least for sometime as it's still working, reading their announcement I'm supposed to have it working till the end of the year, but since AuroraZ is older than a year your service should've stopped back in Sep. Good to know

AuroraZ

{humor}I may have fallen off the turnip truck but I definitely did not fall off it within the last year.{/humor} Yeah it is still working on a site I no longer own. Suppose I had better fix that some day lol.