Review: Pingdom, easy and powerful website uptime monitor
As a full-time blogger, losing traffic means loosing money. Therefore, website uptime is a critical issue to me. Besides getting a reliable web server, I also need a good website uptime monitor to notify me as soon as something goes wrong about the server.
It is not easy to get a budget, easy to use, and powerful uptime monitoring service, until I found Pingdom. Pingdom is a new website and server monitoring service company. Although it is new but many big companies are their customers, such as Alexa, Feedburner, Ziff Davis, and Skype.
I have been using Pingdom services to monitor my websites (and other’s websites) for a couple of months. I like its continuous effort to improve performance and add new features. The following is my brief review of Pingdom monitoring services.
Table of Contents
Add a Pingdom check
Before you can monitor a website/server, you need to add a check. The user interface is easy to use and understand.
The check resolution means how often the check test your website. The lowest is 1 minute, means check your site every minute. Beside normal web checks, Pingdom also support advance network checks and email checks. That’s a very powerful check.
For check notification, you can be notified by email or SMS. Yes, Pingdom send SMS to your mobile when your site is down. Also, you can set the frequency of notifications.
After you added a check, Pingdom starts monitoring your website/server. Did I tell you that no installation required? :)
Pingdom report
The Pingdom check monthly report is beautiful, and easy to understand. Beside choosing the period, you can choose the check locations for the report. Pingdom check is a multiple locations checks with probe servers across the earth.
Here is the sample check report of the Bursa Malaysia website(klse.com.my) in the October 2007.
Image: Pingdom uptime report for Bursa Malaysia website
The uptime graph clearly shows you how stable is a website/server. As you see, the Bursa Malaysia website has very poor uptime before 16th November 2007, and hours downtime at 30th November 2007. The red color means website/server downtime more than an hour.
Sometimes, even your web server is up but your website might still not be accessible because the server is too busy to response. Therefore, Pingdom report also shows response time performance of your site.
Image: Pingdom response time report for Bursa Malaysia website
Averagely, the Bursa Malaysia website has response time more than 8000ms (8 seconds). That’s very slow! Normal response time should not over 1000ms. The hike at 19th November 2007 maybe caused by DDoS attacks.
If the graphs cannot satisfy your curiosity, there is a detailed downtime and response time table at the bottom of the report.
Image: Pingdom reports detailed downtime and response time
The table shows the detail average response time, uptime and downtime period. Clicking the downtime period shows the details of the downtime. It is very detail indeed!
Pingdom public reports
Want to show off your server perfect uptime? No problem. Pingdom offers public reports for your check. You can choose which check to be enable to public and has a summary page with all the checks you have make public.
Pingdom API is also available for web developer to build their own application.
Why pay for uptime monitoring service?
Yes, there are free website uptime monitors. However, none of them will offer 1-minute check to test your site every minute. The free monitors only able to offer slower checks (e.g. 10-minute).
The long gap between checks not only give you inaccurate reports, but also cause delay of downtime notifications. Worse, you might miss a downtime completely.
How much is the Pingdom service?
The Pingdom Basic is $9.95/month (credit card payment). You get 5 checks and 20 SMS. Additional checks is $0.50 USD each per month. All checks are 1-minute monitoring resolution (check your site every minute). Signup for Pingdom 30-day free trial to get a feel of it.
My two cents
With Pingdom, I always the first to know when my web server has problem. Thereby, I am able to notify my server side support team to fix the problem before they discover it.
If your website uptime is important to you, I highly recommend Pingdom website monitoring service. It has a very affordable price to offer 1-minute monitoring resolution for 5 checks. I don’t see other competitors has the similar offer. :)
Tip: you can also use Pingdom to check if a web hosting provider keep their uptime promise and how reliable is their servers. ;)
Pingdom promo code
Good news! I am given a special Pingdom promo code to LiewCF Tech Blog readers. Whoever signup Pingdom with the promo code will enjoy 50% discount to the 1st invoice, PLUS 100 extra SMS for alerts!
Here is the Pindom promo code (valid till end of 2007): liewcf2007
How to use it? When you sign up for either Pingdom Basic or Pingdom Business, or when you upgrade from trial, enter it into the “promotional code” field and press “Apply code”.
It is important to monitor website 247 (around the clock) because its presence in Cyberspace is money to many people.
During my younger days on the Net in early 1994 – I’m not too old – I was using cheap hosting services without a care about my websites’ (+500, YES +500) uptime and downtime until I discovered some of them had been getting no traffic at all. I don’t want to name any names but the hosting providers were in Malaysia. Despite desperate numerous phone calls and emails, no explanations given – but they were quick to send various reminders and junk mails . I said goodbye to them and signed up for hosting services in the US.
Now I’m happy because my presence on the Net is almost 99%. I will have a look at Pingdom. Thanks.
Please allow me to add an important matter.
It is about Chinese domains.
Getting a reliable hosting provider is of the outmost importance. Getting the right domains is equally (if not more) important too. I bought a lot of Chinese domains (.cn, .hk, etc) – including expensive ones at $150 each – since there were so many good keywords still available in early 2006. I was happy until I noticed that my websites with Chinese domains were very slow-loading despite minimum graphics and no fanciful stuffs – just pure HTML pages. I was told that the relevant Chinese authorities were monitoring incoming and outgoing traffic of domains under their control (the domain registries in China) thus an explanation for the delays. I was also told that their Internet infrastructure was still not good resulting in slow Internet traffic. Since not popular anymore .cn domains are so cheap, less than $3 now. It was about $150 each when I bought Forum.cn which is no longer mine.
I still have Girls.hk.cn, Website.hk.cn, Paintball.hk.cn, etc. About ten of them
Anybody to add about Chinese domains?
“Averagely, the Bursa Malaysia website has response time more than 8000ms (8 seconds). That’s very slow! Normal response time should not over 1000ms. The hike at 19th November 2007 maybe caused by DDoS attacks.”
Darn DDoS again, I hate it.
Kenneth, Bloggers-Journey.com
Kenneth,
Since you appeared to be knowledgeable about “response time”, do you think what I heard about the Chinese domain names being slow is true?
I’m using some of the best servers in the world but the Chinese domain registries are executing some the commands before the pages are being served by the browsers.
Just like driving a fast sport car in Kajang Town.
@Ainuddin: if you are using own DNS and web server outside China, I don’t see there will be issue of traffic controlling for china top level domain.
I’ve been using so many site traffic monitoring programs.. There’s one internally build into my CMS, Google, sitemeter.. but somehow I find that none of these are accurate.. all giving me different counts
Maybe I should try out their 30-day free trial :)
Liew,
Thanks for your explanation. I had written to both Hosgator (hosting provider) and Dynadot (Registrar) for information regarding the matter because CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) is involved too.
It would be great to have this kind of service here in Malaysia since most of the web hosting companies here dont even care about the uptime of their servers.
A very interesting tool. So far, I thought a free monitoring with 10-minutes gaps was enough.. but you right, 10-minutes is a huge gap!
yeah.. I knew pingdom when my blog had a slow loading last few weeks..
from there, they provide us very detail informations about every single thing in our blog or site..
last time, from pingdom I know adverlets had a problem and then I’ve posted a complain to Josh Lim :D and he responded to it quickly :D
yea.. we can’t deny that monitoring a website is very important nowadays as the internet is rapidly change nowaday..
The price is high for small blog or website like mine
I’ve been using Pingdom since last year. I don’t think it’s “new” as a couple of months old.
“we are waiting for cpanel techs to fix this and we hope they will do so soon.”
That was the reply given by one of web hosting providers when I asked them why I couldn’t create any sub-domains. Reliability is also another important issue.