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”.