Review Detail

What I really like about pingdom is that it "just works". What I mean by that is that if your site hiccups or is flaky at all, you'll find out about it. And something many people don't know - search engines will virtually stop sending you traffic if you're flaky for any length of time.

Also it's pretty cheap considering that it checks your site once a minute - and if you want to be sure your site is solid (read: not at all flaky) you want to check every minute for sure.

Over the past decade I've run various online services, and tried many remote monitoring systems. Pingdom is by far the best one hands down. It's simple, and it works.

One of the best features is the Response Time monitoring (and graphing) * although I'd really like to see alerts kicked off based on response time too, but alas, I'm sure that'll come.

As a previous poster noted , they do (or did) have a bug, but it's one I can live with. When we had a major downtime (when moving web hosts actually) we did get about 80 consecutive alerts. But we cured that by setting the high # of alerts for any incident to 3 or whatever. And guess what, the other monitoring hosts I've been with never sent extra alerts, but they missed flakiness which in one occasion ended up in a material loss of tens of thousands of dollars over a several month period.

If you depend on your web site(s), run pingdom. And no, we're not affiliate with them in any way, they just rock.