Pingdom Review

Expert Rating: 9.3 User Rating: 8.3

Review by Steven Johnson
Written: September 12, 2007
Updated: December 12, 2012
 
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ProsPingdom is top-dog in uptime monitoring because of excellent all-around service

ConsWebsite administration is slow at times

Bottom LinePingdom makes website uptime monitoring a piece of cake. Get up to the minute response and up time monitoring for multiple websites.

GO

Editor review

(Updated: July 12, 2010)
Overall rating 
 
9.3
Value Price vs Features 
 
9.0
Reliability and Accuracy 
 
10.0
Ease of Setup and Use 
 
9.0

Excellent Company and Service

Pingdom is a very reliable and valuable uptime monitoring service. As time has moved on we find ourselves moving more and more websites to their uptime monitoring service.

The interface is very easy to set up and use. It has been a while since we have needed their helpdesk / tech support but I seem to remember it being very responsive.

The great thing about an uptime monitoring service is they help keep your web hosting company honest. Periodically we have web sites on servers that start having problems. Sometimes the hosting company helpdesk will try to give you the run around about the servers uptime. All we have to do then is reference the Pingdom reports to see what the real story is. Occasionally we offer to provide a screen shot of the Pingdom uptime and response time for their server. Pingdom acts as a very convincing piece of evidence.

In summary we have been very pleased with Pingdom and continue to add sites to their service for uptime monitoring.

Pros and Cons

Pros
Very Reliable
Great Reports
Well established company
Cons
none other than the cost
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User reviews

4 reviews

Overall rating 
 
8.3
Value Price vs Features 
 
8.0  (4)
Reliability and Accuracy 
 
7.8  (4)
Ease of Setup and Use 
 
9.0  (4)
Ratings (the higher the better)
Value Price vs Features
Reliability and Accuracy
Ease of Setup and Use
Reviewer Overview
Pros and Cons
Comments
Overall rating 
 
5.7
Value Price vs Features 
 
3.0
Reliability and Accuracy 
 
7.0
Ease of Setup and Use 
 
7.0

Not all that's advertised

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.

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Overall rating 
 
9.7
Value Price vs Features 
 
10.0
Reliability and Accuracy 
 
9.0
Ease of Setup and Use 
 
10.0

Best monitoring service I found in years; must hav

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.

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Overall rating 
 
8.3
Value Price vs Features 
 
10.0
Reliability and Accuracy 
 
5.0
Ease of Setup and Use 
 
10.0

Started out great but not so much anymore....

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.

Was this review helpful to you? 
Overall rating 
 
9.3
Value Price vs Features 
 
9.0
Reliability and Accuracy 
 
10.0
Ease of Setup and Use 
 
9.0

Great Service

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.

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Uptime Monitoring Plan Features

Price:
$9.95 to $39.95
Checks/Month:
5
Free Trial:
Yes
Free Account:
Yes

Check Frequency

Check Frequency:
  • 1 Minute
  • 5 Minutes
  • 15 Minutes
  • 30 Minutes
  • 60 Minutes

Monitoring Criteria

Notification Methods:
  • Email
  • SMS (Mobile Phone)
Notification Contacts:
Multiple Contacts
Summary Reports:
  • Online Graphical Reports
  • Online Summary Reports
Monitoring Points:
11 to 24
Notification Events:
  • Up Alert
  • Down Alert
  • Repeated Down Alert
Services Monitored:
  • HTTP Sensor
  • TCP Sensor
  • Ping Sensor
  • UDP Sensor
Languages Available:
English
Uptime Buttons:
No

Support Options

Email / Help Desk:
Yes
Phone Support:
Yes
Member Forum:
No
Live Chat:
Yes

Notable Features:

  • Multiple uptime check frequencies
  • Notifications via email and SMS
  • Different types of notification events
  • Online graphic reports and pingdom panel
  • Good customer service

Company Highlights:

Pingdom helps you track the uptime of your website by offering a wide range of services designed for monitoring your websites uptime. They are widely known for what they do and have some larger customers.

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Pingdom Review
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