We are hardwired to hope for the best. We don’t consider bad things could happen, and we trust that a superhero in our engineering team will save the day (i.e., pull an all-nighter to resolve an outage.)

Reality is that our cloud infrastructures have become so complicated that anything (a cache is full, a microservice is unresponsive, a database license expired) can affect our sites uptime.

A website down has an enormous negative impact on business: disappointed users, revenue lost, maintenance cost, bad press, people screaming, you name it.

You need to know before no one else if your site is down. I used to use Pingdom. They don’t offer a free option anymore, and I don’t think you should spend money on a status checker feature.

I’ve found three alternatives you can use:

  1. Freshping: super easy to create an account and add domains. My favorite option.
  2. Uptime Robot: you need to confirm your email before you use it. The UI looks old.
  3. HetrixTools: the UI is not great, but you can send pings from up to three different locations.
Leo Celis