Pingdom Review

So I've been posting this around to a few review sites, to make sure people who are considering pingdom will know of some of the negatives.

I tried pingdom out, and it's a good concept. However it's got a number of issues, 1 is they continually sent all notifications twice. Also the offer they make (20 sms for free monthly account, 20 sms for basic account, and 30 sms for pro account) are simply not true. You get 20 SMS when you sign up, but that's it, you don't get 20 more when you switch to a basic account, and they don't get refilled each month unless you pay MORE money, so the advertising is deceptive.

Then when I canceled our prepaid year account subscription they didn't kill the subscription only they deleted the entire account instantly. So far no money back either.

I'm going to have to say FAIL. Avoid Pingdom, try one of the other uptime services.

If they where just honest upfront I don't think their prices are all that bad. The service needs a little more debugging time, but all in all it could work. However, deceptive business practices is simply a non-starter for us.

Good luck.

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.

Monitoring over 100 sites and the service worked great at first. Now the service is a total pain.

If one of our monitors gets fired off it starts a cycle of all 100+ monitors sending our notices of up/down for over an hour unless I manually turn all of them off and then back on.

I have yet to receive responses to email ticket submitted to support.

I have this service on my Neighborhood association website. This is a lifesaver because I am alerted by Pingdom and not the neighbors when the site goes down.