Categories
Announcements

What’s Next For Uptime Robot?

Quick links

    It has been 3 years since Uptime Robot has launched.

    The service taught us a lot about scaling, advanced HTTP and managing a widely-used product. We saw that no two sites, servers or networks are the same and learned how to deal with them all.

    We try hard to make it stay simple-yet-functional, improve the engine and provide premium-like support. Lately, we have been working hard on few things (that's why we didn't push new features for a while). So, what's next?

    A totally new engine with "second-perfect monitoring"

    If you have ever dug the HTTP logs of your site, you may have realized that Uptime Robot is not always checking sites in 5 mins strictly. It is sometimes 5 mins 10 seconds, sometimes, 5 mins 50 seconds and when there is load (on network, etc.), this can change even few minutes.

    We have spent the last few months on rewriting the monitoring engine completely with a better technology, testing the new engine now and will activate it within a week.

    Although this sounds like a technical detail, it will completely change the stability and capability of Uptime Robot.

    Monitors will be checked almost second perfect, downtimes will be detected much better and it will help us to add more features with ease.

    Uptime Robot v2

    The new engine mentioned was our first step to v2. We are also working on a completely revamped interface.

    Again simple but much better and many more new features (response time monitoring and reports are some of them).

    There are few months left for launching it.

    Will it stay free?

    Well, no decisions to make it paid.

    We tried many ways to monetize it (sponsors, ads, etc.) and experienced that they are all short term. For today, we are "ok" with compensating the costs. If one day we feel that this financing model threatens its future, that may be the time for premium plans. So, as far as we know, still free :).

    261 replies on “What’s Next For Uptime Robot?”

    Thanks for your amazing service. It makes my sleep better when I’m promptly informed about downtime of my servers. I understand things are rather not free and thus I see any future changes in free/nonfree reasonable. How about integrate Flatter? Micropayments seems to me as good addition to your revenue sources..
    Best, bzzzwa

    I second the call for a donate button. Also consider adding an iOS and Android app. You could make that paid, even an in-app purchase per month/year in order to get push notifications directly. Find some sample projects, host it on Azure and you won’t have much coding to do.

    For me, the 50 website limit is a shortage, especially when I want to monitor all servers/services in the clusters.
    Premium plan for more (preferably unlimited) sites to monitor would be a great feature even now.
    Of course, the several-account workaround works fine 🙂

    Maybe you could start monetizing your product with the Freemium business model. I would do the following if I were in your shoes.

    First, I’d keep the existing functionality absolutely free. You don’t want to cause a riot among your existing users.

    Secondly, I would implement a knowledge base with detailed step-by-step solutions for all possible server error codes (500, 501, 502, … 508 …) and all other scripting errors (PHP errors, warnings, MySQL errors, …).

    Then, when one of your periodical HTTP requests detects an error (either a server error, or a PHP/MySQL/Python/scripting error inside the returned HTML code), your paying Premium users would instantly receive the detailed step-by-step instructions on how to resolve this particular issue into their email inbox.

    Here’s an example. Your software checks the website of one of your Premium users, and it detects an error. Your Premium user could instantly receive an email that looks something like this:

    ———-
    Website: http://www.example.com/
    Check performed: 10:38 on Jan 24, 2013

    Error: Returned page probably includes a PHP Fatal Error report.

    Suggestion: Check your website to see the detailed report. Your PHP script ran out of memory. Try increasing the memory limit by using the following PHP code at the begining of your script: ini_set(“memory_limit”, “128M”);

    Error Excerpt: fatal error: out of memory (allocated 262144) (tried to allocate 491520 bytes) in /home/example/public_html/index.php on line 123
    ———-

    My 2 cents. 😉

    Yes, I’d be OK with paying something, just be realistic, I’m not Bill Gates. Probably easier to get 1000 small website owners to pay $6 a year than to get 100 to pay $60.

    @Zofie,
    We always thought accepting donations would look awkward if the service ever becomes premium. But still considering that.

    @bzzzwa,
    Thanks so much for the support. Flattr is awesome and not integrated it yet for the same thought on donations.

    @kdawson, @Gordon168,
    Thanks so much.

    @jpantuso,
    Mobile is the 1st thing to be focused after the Uptime Robot v2 (P.S. few 3rd party and paid apps exist for Uptime Robot -non of them has Push notifications as far as I know-).

    @Aaron,
    That’s a great suggestion (smart notifications) and noted. Thanks much.

    @Paulius,
    Just contact us from support@uptimerobot.com, let us know the number of monitors you need and we can update the limit.

    @Mirko,
    Thanks so much.

    So long as the donation was tied to an account, you could grandfather those users into premium accounts if that ever happened.

    I’d definitely donate — I think you’re doing a great job creating a service thats better than most paid services, and so I’m happy to contribute to continue making an excellent service.

    Uptime Robot is fantastic. I love the fact that you’ll check non-standard ports. It’s proven itself extremely valuable! Keep up the good work.

    Charge for it! Maybe a basic plan for $5/month. You guys have a great service and would happily pay for it. Plus more funds mean even better features!

    Just make it a pay service, it’s no big deal. Pingdom is a pay service and it’s terrific, and I pay for it. It’s only negative is that it costs too much for a lot of sites. If you can find the middle ground between free and what Pingdom changes, you will make plenty of dough.

    Give people monitoring for free on 5 sites or something along those lines, then offer subscription models for more.

    First off great work. I have only been using the service few days now but your tool does exactly what it is supposed to do.

    I think an iOS/Android app would be a great addition and yes I would charge for it. Anyone that values the service would be foolish to complain at a few bucks.

    A couple additional comments: Why not make the test interval a setup value to lessen the load on your servers. I have some sites that are not crutial and could be set at 30 minute intervals. Maybe once an error is found, behind the scene do 5 minute tests until it is found to be back up. Also if a site is down for an extended period (I dont know what this time limit is) stop testing it every 5 minutes and go to one an hour. How many sites have been down for weeks (you have the stats). An enhancement request would be to scan for a string upon a successful connection. This way if I have an error page or the ISP has an error page which traps the error, scanning for a string could still detect that the site is basicaly down.

    My 2 cents.

    Hi, If there is a button, I will donate. I’m a happy customer and your service has proven to be successful to me. Uptime Robot informed me earlier about outages than my hosting provider and the page-monitor informed me 2 times that a hacker has hijacked the page of a website (monitoring words to appear on the website).

    Many thanks and keep up the good work (please inform when the button is available!

    I run a completely free service with over two million subscribers myself so I totally get the dilemma. If you charge for the service, your subscribers suddenly become your “clients” and you may have legal responsibilities to consider. You’re monthly overhead costs are probably minimal so you ask yourself is it worth it to even invest the time in collecting fees.

    Unless you intend to take Uptime Robot mainstream and really invest in HA equipment over multiple data centres, higher legal council, and create a formal billing system I doubt charging fees will be worth the effort. Like everyone else, I say just put up a PayPal donate button. I’d gladly donate but, I must confess, from my experience 99% of your subscribers won’t. They may be something else to consider.

    Thanks for this great service. As an admin, it gives me peace of mind and allows me to appear “proactive” in the event of an outage.

    How many websites is Uptime Robot currently monitoring?

    I LOVE this service and would gladly pay! Get that donation address out there and I will setup a monthly donation.

    It’d be great if you guys shared different operating costs and anayltics data with the community. That information is motivation enough to donate.

    Thank for delivering this valuable service and keeping it free.
    While I second the idea of having a “donate” button or alike, I’m open for a paid for service with premium features.

    I also want to say thanks for such a great and amazing service. I would also like to 2nd most of the suggestions here, as your service has helped me greatly in identifying downed sites and I would be more than willing to contribute monetarily in some way or another.

    Hey great work. Looking forward to get things going on our end with the new engine.

    We have been busy on our end as well, adding and testing options to communicate to users faster and efficiently. One of them being Push Notifications. So staty tuned!!

    Don’t forget to check the app on the apple store

    I only found out how bad the hosting I bought on Ebay was thanks to your service. It convinced me to get a package from a reputable provider. Many thanks.

    Making a donation would be a good opportunity to show some gratitude, nevertheless if uptime robot would become a payed service I would become, as mentioned before, a happily paying costumer!!!

    I remember a nice free service for DNS management called EveryDNS. It was running for years powered only by donations. Until another company bought it hehe

    I think that at this moments, while the service remains free, accepting donations can be a nice try to avoid to change service to “forced” paid plans.

    I’d be fine with paying $5 or $10 bucks a year or a donate button.

    Uptimerobot helps me sleep at night!

    Thanks for a great service.

    Dave

    I agree with Zofie, i love to donate for this great service. But it would be great if there was a way to do that. 🙂
    Even if it would be awkward, it is a good way until that time comes.

    Thanks a lot for a great service!

    Best regards!

    We have just started to use uptime robot at http://www.smartelly.com
    We need to keep our servers up 24/7 and this helps us identify faults before we start getting support tickets. Uptimerobot is better than most of the paid services out there.
    We would donate/pay per year a small fee.
    Also an android app would go down well and also happy to pay.

    There are many users who run multinational websites, one way to make money would be of you allow user to choose the location of the monitoring service for premium users

    If a free website or service has a ‘donate’ button, I’m definitely inclined to click it and donate if I feel I can afford to that week. If it doesn’t and the service is important to me (which it would be if I’m looking at the site), I have no way to help out whoever is proving the service. The PayPal button can be set up with a suggested donation which I can increase or decrease. I agree with rob above who says that it’s ‘probably easier to get 1000 small website owners to pay $6 a year than to get 100 to pay $60. $6 for a year is nothing for such an incredibly valuable service.

    Not much to add here other than I love the service and would definitely provide financial support, either as a donation or paid service. Keep in mind though that I might never have tried it if you only had a paid version. I am a try then buy person for sure.

    Best of luck with the updates!

    I read a blog post a while back about a service (or app, I can’t remember) that had moved from donations to freemium. They had recorded who had donated how much, and simply used the donation as a contribution towards the paid service when that time came. Eg if you had donated more than the new service cost, your account was upgraded for free. If you had paid less, you could top it up to the new amount. I thought this seemed a good solution. I forget where I read this, sorry… Carbon Copy Cloner did a simpler version of this — see http://help.bombich.com/kb/overview/carbon-copy-cloners-transition-to-a-commercial-product-frequently-asked-questions — but that isn’t the article I’m thinking of. Hope this helps… I’m keen to pay for useful apps and services…

    I totally agree with everything @MarkB said. Good ideas, definitely. And I, too, would gladly donate (one service, I even sent the guy a $20 Amazon gift card because I liked it so much), but would also be more than happy to pay an annual fee of up to $20. I pay $9/year for screencast-o-matic.com, and think they don’t charge enough. I’m definitely willing to pony up to help keep y’all running!!

    I really appreciate the great service and all the hard work. I’d be up for a reasonable fee, beyond say a site or two. Keep up the good work!

    I manage 8 company websites (several of them operating for different time zones on the other side of the world). I faced the issue of not knowing when hosting issues were occurring. Since using your service, I identified and solved several hosting issues with my providers. All thanks to your service. Keep up the great work.

    Thanks a ton for improving a service that is already top-notch. I’d donate/upgrade happily.
    Keep up the amazing work.

    Hi, I really would pay for a premium service, where I can handle more domains than now. Please also let me input *.travel – domains in future!
    Regards, Michael

    It’s the best ever free software I have seen on the net, we use it for our B2B and B2C websites and are able to solve server issues faster then ever! We love your product!

    Thanks for your great service. Please don’t listen to the people asking you to charge for the currently free service :-), but I think all the other ideas are great. A mobile app, a premium account to monitor more than 50 sites, and the donate button, all solid ideas…and I don’t think asking for donations conflicts with a possible future premium/for-profit model either.

    One thing with the donations idea–you could include a link in the notifications we get, so you’re reminding people right when they are feeling the value of the service. Something like: “Uptime Robot is currently supported by user donations. If you value this service, you can help to support and improve it by donating here: [link]” I don’t see how anyone could object to that, and it could get you some much-deserved revenue for your great service. 🙂

    Thanks again – you help me keep my (and my clients’) web hosts honest!

    Thanks so much for the “will to support”, that’s so motivating.

    There are lots of great ideas in the comments regarding donations, pricing and the features.

    Specially, we loved the idea of user-specific donations (donating when logged-in) where the donation amount can become the balance of the user if the service ever goes premium. This removes a possible conflict.

    Like mentioned before, for more monitors, if you need them now, just contact support@uptimerobot.com for that and we’ll update the limit (free).

    Right now, focused too much on launching the new engine (it works awesome) and will be updating back once it is “live”.

    Again, thanks so so much on the support.

    Thanks for this great service. I use your service to monitor my work. An idea you might want to look into is integrating with pushover.net which allows me to get notified with out having my personal email on my work mobile devices.

    I Would be willing to got to a paid version if the ping times were say around 1 – 2 min to make downtime alerts even faster. We monitor many servers and some of them are critical for uptime. Super great service I am glad I found it, it has been a life saver on many occasions.

    I think within a couple of days of starting to use Uptime Robot I emailed offering to contribute a donation! The main thing for me is to keep the service sustainable so it keeps on going – I’ve tried enough monitoring services over the years and really like this one, it’s definitely the best for me!

    Can fully understand the conflict if people donate, then it becomes a paid service, that would perhaps be a bit awkward, but I’d definitely support the idea above of the donations turning into credit should it become a paid service. It may be that the donations are enough to sustain the site by themselves anyway, especially if the donation links could be made quite prominent and, with your loyal fan base, I think you’d get a good response.

    A free / premium offering is also a great idea. Personally I think the current 50 monitors and 5 minute interval checks is very generous indeed.

    If all accounts do become paid at some point further down the line, then I’m sure a lot of people would be very willing to pay a monthly fee (me included), but the only thing I would urge on that is to keep the pricing realistic for small users. Pingdom and a few other services are way to expensive for me to justify when they cost about as much as my actual hosting!!

    Great to see all this innovation though – I don’t know how you guys do it and you provide a very useful service to a lot of people! Having the API service, third-party integration like Twitter and Boxcar notifications, etc, is fantastic, plus I love the way the service does a quick recheck before it says a site is down – Pingdom doesn’t even do well at that! I look forward to remaining a very happy Uptime Robot customer for many years to come! 🙂

    Thanks so much for uptime robot! Your product has saved my ass so many times! I get alerts with Boxcar on my iPhone and it works great now. Finding out my server is down after 10 minutes is better than an hour if I didnt have your service. If you end up having to charge for it I would happily pay something like a small yearly fee. Keep up the good work!

    It is a thing around 13:00-14:00 on February 28.
    Although it was operating normally, however when the server down jacket was carried out, there were two or more reports from uptimerobot.
    Is it an obstacle of uptimerobot?

    A great tool for monitoring uptime, last months i needed it the most 🙁

    I am willing to pay a small amount a month. Or to pay a amount for heavy users.

    Thanks for this fantastic tool.

    1. Your service is awesome.
    2. Love that’s it’s free, but it’s not the best business model.
    3. I’d be very sad if you guys had to shut down, because you couldn’t make it financially (Plus I’d feel bad for not helping out)
    4. If you guys decide to charge, please find a way to make it like $5/month for 50 sites or something like that 🙂 I’d “donate” that now…

    thank you for the great service,
    Donation, Donation will be great way to go,
    And We need a app for all platform,

    Again thank alot

    Hi, I don’t know what else to add that’s not repeating what everyone else has said! lol – It’s a great service, and I think the free version should stay as it is, but to pay a *small* fee to monitor 51 or more sites!

    But if you put too many restrictions on the FREE account, no one will use it, so it’s a bit of a double edged sword!! Before signing up with Uptime Robot, I’ve been using some other FREE monitor sites for evaluation, and nothing comes close to Uptime Robot!!

    The other ‘FREE’ services only offer 30 minute monitoring or one test location which means you can’t really tell what a service is like. It appears my host had a major outage last night, but I only got alerts from Uptime Robot giving me details of the full event!!

    I’m looking forward to the new features, and keep up the great work! 🙂

    Great to hear the future remains bright for your frankly excellent service!

    I would love to find a ‘global sms’ service as I travel around quite a bit and regularly change sim cards in random countries… think you could also earn a bit of $$ from this as subscribers could pay for credits??

    Thanks again, keep up the good work,
    Paul

    We rely on uptime robot extensively. Like some of the others, I would pay for this service. That reminds me… I need to donate again. Thanks for developing such a wonderful product.

    I got here from ManageWP, they used to give out this service for free and now it’s only for the business plan, so registered directly.

    Also I’m a graphic designer and would enjoy helping you guys with design.

    The web must continue to be free, at least a part of it.

    =)

    I’m a new user, been online with uptime robot for a couple days now, and really like what I see. I’m definitely interested in the increased frequency monitor. When do you anticipate v2 being available?

    Keep up the great work!

    Guys, something is seriously wrong ,the monitors don’t seem to produce reliable output at all. I’m ping monitoring some hosts and if I unplug the Ethernet cable from the monitors host, the website sometimes “notices” that the node is down, but sometimes it simply does not. If I do a manual refresh after disconnecting a host, most of the time the monitor will turn yellow, but after re-checking again in 9/10 cases it will go back to green even though the host is still has still unplugged Ethernet.

    I’ve written to the support but got no reply in ~48h. Honestly, I want to give this service the benefit of the doubt as it’s free and everybody seems to be happy with it, but either something went seriously wrong during the last few days or I am unlucky enough that only the monitors in my account don’t work.

    AMAZING service thank you works so well and really happy. Getting close to the 50 domains so would be happy to pay for over 50 or even to donate to your cause.

    Thanks again

    Regards the free vs paid thing, why not add a paypal “Donate” button, you can raise some money from those able / willing to pay without excluding those who cannot afford / do not want to pay.

    Uptime Robot is a really great service and I really appreciate that you guys are keeping it free.

    Probably a “Freemium” model would work well. If a user had over 50 sites they wanted to monitor you could charge a nominal monthly free. Another nice option would be notifications that could be sent to multiple emails and numbers.

    Keep up the good work and I will continue to use Uptime Robot.

    Thanks!

    I love this service and wouldn’t mind donating to keep everyone happy. Reading through all the comments I’m sure we can work a win-win compromise.

    @Larry,
    v2 is expected to be out in the next few months (we are working hard on it).

    @Szilard,
    That seemed like a performance issue/bug in our old engine. We are moving all monitors to the new engine which shall be fixing this bug (ticket replied).

    You guys could charge $1 per month/ $12 per year (like Lastpass) and most people would easily pay for the service.

    I’d be more than happy to pay a one off or monthly fee. This is an amazing tool and really valuable.

    As for a revenue model, how about this? Sell the software for internal system monitoring, kind of like a lightweight Big Brother. And keep public monitoring free.

    Noticing a lot of erratic behavior in the last week… so much so that I disabled all of my monitors. I am seeing my monitors being hit a minute apart in some cases. The UptimeRobot is sending me dozens of alerts for the same monitor, all within the same minute or two. When I hit those monitoring URLs myself, they are up and responding fine.

    I’m not sure what has changed in the last week, but the alerts are now very unreliable and are mainly false negatives.

    Just signed up but so far I love this. Another feature would be to allow different levels of notifications. So if it is down for 5 minutes… this person is notified… if it is down for 15 minutes… this person is notified. I’d gladly pay for that.

    @Larry,
    This was a due to a bug on our new monitoring engine. Fixed it now and everything shall work so good.

    We are noting every revenue model possible and will be discussing in detail if that day ever comes.

    Thanks so much for all the ideas, we had never thought this much of possibilities and it is great to experience how sharing all the situation with all the honesty returns back positively to us.

    Hello,

    We had a blip this morning on several of our servers, but did not receive any notifications. Was there any issues with the monitoring software in the past 24 hours?

    Great service! Thank you.

    @admin, now that you are discussing possible revenue model, you should at least start with the pay with a tweet aplication for new registrations, that way more people will learn about this great product. Just saying. =)

    I love the service, but lately there have been a lot more false positives than earlier this year. In fact, everything alarmed incorrectly last night for me. Was that another bug?

    I love your site but have not be able to use it yet. To monitor my site I need to add api keys into the header. If you can add the ability to include http header values this would be awesome.

    Thanks

    Great and free way to monitor sites. i agree with the comment to make it free for 1-3 sites and paid for more than that. But whatever u choose best of luck and thx .

    last week few false alerts but i think u r already aware of that.

    Excellent work, really like the ease of use UptimeRobot. Two opinions that leave are:

    1) Improved web interface that could be more modern and rich;
    2) In the emails do not come over time that application was outside, which facilitated much to the SLA.

    Hello,

    I’ve just went through my server logs and I’ve found — to my big surprise — the check interval isn’t “5 mins 10 seconds, sometimes, 5 mins 50 seconds” as you wrote, but about an HOUR. Here are the times for today:

    00:55:53
    01:49:44
    02:42:01
    03:30:01
    04:19:57
    05:11:55
    05:58:06
    06:56:32
    07:48:16
    08:48:58
    09:44:28
    10:46:19
    and so on.

    What’s going on please? Thanks.

    Guys,

    Sorry for any false/positives. That was due to a bug on our new engine and it is fixed.

    Also, monitoring intervals should be perfected now.

    Is it just me or did we have false positives again today? I had a couple servers reporting as down that were still responding from 2-3 places around the net.

    Oh and btw, if I could pay a reasonable sum for 1-minute monitoring, I would, especially for ICMP ECHOs.

    Thank you for the free service and for keeping it free. It is really refreshing to see a great service such as this stay free when others with the same quality charge tens of dollars per month.

    I noticed the notification emails have changed from
    “The monitor … is back up (it was down for 16 minute(s) and 32 second(s)).”
    to
    “Hi,The monitor Carinas (http://www.arubacarinas.com) is back UP (OK).”

    I like the previous message with “it was down for.. minutes” better. FOr the rest is it a great tool to monitor website. Thank you for this free service!

    Marcel van Schie

    Hello,

    Sorry but I couldn’t understand how the robot works, it’s just point the monitor for a page and is it ok?

    I have a page that returns AppOK if the App is ok, how can I tell the robot that word?

    thks.

    I’m just changing over from Apple to Android. Any plans for an Android push app? If not, does anyone fancy playing around with the API and creating an Android App? Would be one of the coolest things in the world.

    I love your service. Please keep on doing what you’re doing.

    An advocate and fan.

    Dear Team, after the upgrade to V2 the “monitor is up” email no longer tells us about how long the site was down. This information was provided in the earlier version. Why has this been curtailed?

    Nagesh

    Hi,

    I had today a 90mn down on my website and no email received
    In other hand, I had email when the website went up

    This is what I have on the “down” part in my back office :
    ”
    Down No Response From The Website.
    Alert Contacts Notified:

    Seems like noone.. / manage alert contacts.”

    But on the up part I have my contact email ok

    What’s wrong ???

    Thank you for your service anyway !

    David

    Guys, my monitors seem to gone crazy — they return false positives every few minutes for the last 6 hours. But my sites are up and running without any issues.

    I’m still getting false positives. Uptime Robot is saying a page is down, but it is not. If I force Uptime Robot to refresh, it finds the site is up, but often times will find it (incorrectly) down again in 5 minutes.

    Hey guys – not sure if you’re aware of this, and not sure if this is the right place to post about it, but the monitor has been reporting all of our sites going offline/online for 24 hours. we’re trying to trouble shoot the issue, but when we try to log into our account, uptimerobot.com is severely laggy. I’m starting to wonder if the problem is with the monitor, not our server… but I can even get into my account.

    ps- all of our notification emails say “timeout”

    Gotta say…

    You guys rock – love your work and passion to provide quality and free! Only wish I was using your service for the last year !!

    Cheers & remember that you ARE Appreciated!!

    Gman447

    Hey,

    Regarding the false/positives experienced 2 weeks ago, it was our fault.

    We upgraded our nodejs version, faced incompatibility issues with some code. And, had a network problem at a close time. It took us some time to identify the issues.

    Everything is fixed afterwards and we added multiple false/positive controls, network controls and more to prevent that from happening again.

    For the “was down for” info on e-mails, adding it back very soon.

    For the Android app with push support, as far as I know, there are developers working on such an app.

    Thanks very much for the support guys. Still working hard on v2 and getting close to it.

    Hello!

    I’m use API for start and stop monitor for my website for duration of my backup. Backup is creating about 03:00-03:30 of local time; and within the process web-server is stopped. So, with stopping monitor before and starting it after this time I expect that will be no any events in this time on this monitor at all.

    So, it worked fine for a while; but now (after your switching to new engine, maybe) I regularly get “UP” events for this monitor. Another mine website monitor (which is permanently on) is not generating such events.

    What I must do to avoid this needless “UP” alerts? Night SMS without reason is very uncomfortable for me and espesially for my boss. 🙁
    Or can You extend your API for possibility to change monitor status not only to ‘0’ or ‘1’ state (‘paused’ and ‘not checked yet’), but ‘2’ (‘up’) too?

    Aslo, now I noticed that after changing status of this monitor to ‘paused’, then ‘not checked’ via API this status is not changed to ‘up’ within too large time (about hour, not expected 5 minutes), so I press to check it manually. Is API works completely right?..

    It would be great to allow us to specify a time period to NOT ping, as we take certain servers off-line each night for backup. Have you thought of this service?

    Truely, an awesome service. It helps me to compare the usefulness of different free webhosting.

    Thanks for the great service. Looking forward to the added features.

    Will we get to see the log history expanded to something like the last 30 days in the up coming version? I would very happily pay for a service that could give me a detailed history that could be downloaded as a .CSV or similar.

    Cheers

    So far so good, I’ve got it working on a few web sites.
    Can’t get it to work on a simple server IP yet … hopefully the technology supports it.

    Appreciate this free service!

    @Alexander,

    With the new engine, a status message is fired after starting a “paused” monitor. I agree that it is notnecessary and we’ll be disabling it.

    Regarding the delayed start of the “started” monitors, I’ll be checking that.

    @Todd and @tocra,

    Both will be added in the new version.

    > With the new engine, a status message is fired after starting a “paused” monitor. I agree that it is notnecessary and we’ll be disabling it.

    Thanks!

    > Regarding the delayed start of the “started” monitors, I’ll be checking that.

    I think is was already fixed at about 18th or 20th of May — from that date I recive this ‘UP’ events in right time, about 03:17 of local.

    Thank you for this great and free service. We’re using this to monitor the webshops we host.
    I’d like to bump up Socra’s suggestion: please allow us to see the status of a webshop for a longer period of time. to be able to use a date filter would be even better. HAving it downloaded as a PDF report or a .CSV would be amazing.

    Also, please allow us to move the column divider between the website name and the status bar. I currently have to add a lot of info to the webshop name and it’s cut off with an ellipsis.

    Thanks, guys!

    Are you the guys running infinite wordpress? I signed up for there website monitoring and find that I in turn have to sign up for this. Just a bit concerned as they maintained that by paying them I get this service for ‘free’ I notice that you are reserving the right to charge….

    Hello UptimeRobot team!

    Your service is just great!! Even better and simple for those web analyzer with high costs!
    Keep it up and thank you for create such a nice, simple and fast tool!

    I really appreciate this! 🙂

    First off I have to pronounce my love for the free service you offer. It is beyond stellar with all the monitoring options and precise 5 minute checks, not to mention the solid Android app. THANK YOU!

    Despite the 5 minute checks being the main reason why I absolutely love your service, I was wondering if you’d be willing to add in a monitor option to check LESS frequently. Some websites and/or networks don’t necessarily need to be checked this often (in my opinion). Not only will this allow users to have control between monitoring polls but it has the potential to greatly lessen resource use on your servers.

    It would also be nice to see a manual “refresh monitor” option within the Android app. This would be especially useful during troubleshooting so users don’t have to login to UptimeRobot.com when mobile.

    The Android app is not an official one (agree that it is a very nice app) so w have no control over it.

    Less frequent checks are now possible with the ability to defining “monitoring intervals” in the “new/edit monitor” dialogs

    I absolutely LOVE your service. Thank-you for keeping it free! It has saved my bacon many times already! I use it in conjunction with Infinite WordPress Plug In to keep tabs on all my WP sites.

    Thanks for you Uptimerobot~~

    The engine is so good and very effective. The greatest thing is it is free of charge!!!!
    Really thanks for all of your work~

    Thanks for this wonderful service!

    Another idea would be to add gzip-support to enhance keyword detection to check if page is online but e.g. cache is corrupted and server is sending garbage. Also it would save bandwidth 🙂

    Thank you for the awesome service! 🙂

    Question: It does not look like we need to do anything extra to avoid false visits in Google Analytics. I presume this is because the robot doesn’t execute the analytics scripts. Correct?

    Hi

    Great service

    It would actually be cool if you added a paid version.

    This could be for adding more sites or smaller intervals.

    Hi

    I have added my site for monitoring on Uptime robot but I didn’t get any mail and the status is also shown as up, for yesterday night when actually it was down. May I know the reason for that. And do the site have some constraint of number of days or sites
    Please do help me with it

    @Sunyl,
    Just let us know the details of your account and we’ll be checking (support@uptimerobot.com)?

    @Mark,
    Google Analytics shouldn’t be effected for HTTP monitors but, for keyword monitors, they will be (as GET requests are made). I suggest adding our IPs (http://www.uptimerobot.com/about.asp) to Google Analytics to make sure they are not included (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034823).

    @Matt,
    With v2, less frequent monitoring option is coming.

    @Geoff,
    No, we are not running InfiniteWP (InfiniteWP team integrated Uptime Robot as an addon).

    @Jitesh,
    Amazon EC2 is used for remote nodes but the main engine is on Softlayer.

    It takes more than four days to moderate/answer a query?

    Maybe it’s me … the ISP hasn’t responded either.

    I would like to see a new blog from uptimerobot! After spending about a week studying various site monitoring services, I really like uptime robot and understand how valuable it is. Thank you for continuing to have it offered as a free service.

    If you ever were to charge a fee i would really, really like the ability to post an XML request to my API and parse it for a key phrase; if the key phrase is not there (as in the API is down), the alerts are triggered.

    Hi guys,

    regarding the business model, how about being a web hosting affiliate ? Your website monitors how good web hosts are right ?

    Basically, when a user isn’t happy with its website’s uptime, he will be pissed at his web hosting company. Perfect time to suggest him getting a better one.

    I guess you could put a link in the down alert email you send. Or even show another row in the monitor section. I cannot see why this wouldn’t make you money.

    Maybe some users will complain, but where else can they find a free monitor system that allows 50 websites ?

    Hi there i just new in here, welcome a board! 🙂 doing monitor for all my client server and site. still enjoy the ride, see you soon.

    Hi,

    for first, thanks for your service. Very helpful in my job.

    Just a question (or a suggestion for an improvement): is there any way to export data about the alerts?
    The graphics and the table are very useful to understand what’s happening at a glance, but reporting it to my ISP it’s not so easy. The best will be to have a link to a downloadable file (xml or speadsheet).

    Thanks in advance (and sorry for my poor english)

    This is still the best service there is, and willing to pay for it will be easy : yes
    Keep up the good service/system!

    Frank

    Are you guys ever going to put up a donation button? Your service is incredible and I feel like you guys would at least be able to make SOMETHING if you have a donate button. I mean, heck, you see those things attached to scripts and services that offer FAR less.

    Brilliant tool! But uptimeroot reporting frequent short time outages for few servers I track. Hosting provider swears they do not detect it with their multinational monitors. Is this possible that uptime root has false positives? How does it define the site is down? What respond time does it require etc.?

    The downtime is verified from a remote location for sure and 120 secs timeout is used.

    But, there is still a small chance of false/positives due to any network issues between Uptime Robot servers and the monitor’s server.

    Please keep in mind that your server doesn’t have to be down when your webpage isn’t showing. If your page is being rendered through PHP and the PHP service on the server freezes your page can’t be rendered and UptimeRobot will receive a timeout. However, your server is still online! UptimeRobot will send you a notification that your server is DOWN (it receives a timeout), but your hosting provider will see that the server is UP (they probably don’t check if all service are running).

    I have two checks running on 1 dedicated server, 1 HTML check (plain HTML website) and 1 PHP check (WordPress website). The PHP check gives me more alerts. When the HTML check alerts I drop everything and start fixing.

    Ideally you want UptimeRobot to check a plain HTML file (index.html). That will give you a better understanding of the real downtime of your server (less false positives). However, if you are using it to monitor your own VPS/ dedicated server you want to know if your server is still generating pages so you’d probably are less worried about false positives.

    I hope this short explanation helps.

    Its 8/11/2013 and it seems that monitoring is not sending alerts. I turned off my page to force a monitor but nothing is sent via email. I click refresh on the monitor page and it then shows site is down. The other monitors that I know are also down still report up even though I click refresh.

    Hi,

    We’ve been using your service and we love it. On at least one occasion, it has brought a real website outage to our attention, which is great.

    In the past 7 days though, we’ve started to get a much higher number of reported “outages” (e.g. 6 in the last 72 hours). However, I think that they are false positives. I know this for sure to be the case in at least one example, since I happened to be awake at the time and was able to immediately visit the site and confirm that it was, in fact, still online.

    Has something changed in the past few days that we should be aware of?

    Thanks again for your wonderful service.

    Nothing changed recently but we’d love to take a look at the issue to detect any issues (support@uptimerobot.com).

    Hi!
    Great service, works perfect. I just monitor one port on a server, which is enough for my purposes. But…I rest the serverprogram every night, which takes about 5 minutes. Most of the times your Robot catches it, which is the whole idea of monitoring obviously, but I’d love to see something like planned downtime windows. Or is that a bit much to ask for a free service?
    Keep up the good work!

    Hey there,
    when will you guys release v2?

    Sounds like an huge, nice Update. Would love to see it. It’s quiet in here, also with the payment-thing since july….

    Can you write new updates / news for us to know, how it is about this service?

    Regards,
    Oli

    I love this, I was using Pingdom, and sure they have a fancy interface, but its @$10/mo! this is free, and does word monitoring. This works great with our other sites too, as they are .php and a simple ping only says the server is up, not the site. with the word monitoring, I can put in my google UA-xxxxxx code that is on all my pages, and tell it to only email me if it can’t see my google analytics code. WORKS GREAT thanks!

    Just wanted to thank you for working on improving an already great service. I’ve been using you for since just after launch and have found it to be the best monitoring service around.

    If you do decide on a paid model, I would certainly endorse a yearly paid plan, something like $25-30 a year would make sense to me and so would be happy to support your efforts.

    Thanks again.

    Thanks for free service. I have 4 website on same server but sometime uptime robot only detect downtime only on 1 or 2 website on that server. I also use cloudflare for all my site. Is it because of cloudflare downtime or something wrong with uptimerobot?

    Thanks.

    We had experienced issues with Cloudflare but they now have all our IPs whitelisted and any Cloudflare-protected site should work fine.

    Great service, donate button is a must for future 🙂

    Improvement proposal: table of response times would be great – nothing fancy, just to tell us how long did each ping/http take to respond.

    Keep up the good work

    Just get a donate button. People know nothing is free and many will donate a few dollars. The smartest one I’ve seen was along the lines:

    $5 Buy me a coffee
    $10 Buy me a drink
    $20 Buy me a meal
    $30 Buy me a great meal
    $50 A night on the town!

    This was for a script I really wanted and the donation must be (as this was) optional. I know what programming costs and I did shout the guy a night out.

    Cheers

    What happened to the interface? It was all compact and clear. Now there is a lot of unnecessary information all over the place, lot of empty space. Where downtime percentage, domain comparison has gone?! Have you beta test it on users first ? Sure it is beautifully ajaxy translucently gay. But is not a beauty contest. The usability is simply fkdup!

    I believe the only lacking thing compared to the old interface is the “uptime percentages” which we’ll be adding besides each monitor (similar to the old interface) as 24 hours events and uptime % was the only info available.

    The old interface was so simplistic (which I think is great) but was holding us to add more features and provide more insights.

    We will always keep Uptime Robot simple and the new interface will also evolve with such feedback.

    P.S. We beta tested it on a group of users, polished the details with feedback but also experience that the real feedback will arrive within time (just like yours). And, thanks so much for that.

    Thank you for your great service,
    you could provide a paid service alert via SMS, I think that many users will join it.
    Regards
    riccardo

    Wow new design looks very profesional and love the response time grafic. I can really compare my different hostings in speed and inform them about it. This is a great free product and i would definitely hit that donation button if you had it activated! thanks.

    Hey guys,

    the new site with the new features sure looks good, but believe it or not, this way uptimerobot became useless to me!
    The one thing I really needed and loved about the old site, was, that I could see all my monitored sites with their respective uptime percentages on one single page.
    Now I have to click each single monitor to see the current uptime percentage, plus the percentages are only for the last 30 days. Who needs that? SLAs are typically on a one year basis, so I need the uptime percentage for the last 12 months.
    It’s a pity that you’re doing this only as a hobby, because you could really build up a nice monitoring service and earn some additional money with it.

    New dashboard looks great – now we just need an Android app hahaha

    Next feature needed is the donation button – as others have said this has proven to be a good reliable tool

    Is there also a way to send a reminder alert – such as if a node is down, 1st alert goes out – still down after 1 hour (or configurable period) second alert or something like that?

    Keep up the good work

    – I would happily pay for SMS (text message alerts) via Twilio or other reputable provider.
    – I would happily pay 2.5USD/mo for “up to 75 sites”
    – I would happily pay 5USD/mo for “up to 10 sites”
    – I would happily pay 5USD/mo for per-minute accuracy.

    Hope that gives you some ideas. 🙂

    We’d love to add it but PushBullet charges the services (Uptime Robot in this case) which prevents us from adding it currently.

    Hi
    Awesome Dash Board UI Guys!
    For the next upgrade are you able to create average response time for last 24hrs, last 7days and last 30 days?

    I like the new look, one question: how do you manually check / refresh your monitored sites?

    I made a change to my site and wanted to manually run a check but could not find any way of doing so.

    Thanks for the freebee, good work.
    Rodney

    Hi,

    Fantastic Tool we use it to monitor our Quote Engines that are hosted by a 3rd party so that we know when the site is down.

    Is there anyway for me to export this information so that I can include it in an MS SQL DB for reporting purposes at Managers Meetings.

    Cheers!

    JML

    Currently, exporting is only available via API. But we’ll be adding CSV (and maybe other formats too) support soon.

    Hi, some more FAQ’s and feedback on the main menu would be good. Also, my monitor graphs are stuck at 16:00, even though other dates on the monitor seem correct. Seems to have problems with IE, works better in Chrome. A nice feature might be a notification during a slowdown, milliseconds reply over a certain threshold for extended time.
    Thanks.

    hi guys great work with the enw dashboard.
    just few small updates/feature request to make it even better.
    1. can you please add “remember me” option on login form. i have pinned tab for dashboard and if this works then i don’t have to login everytime i start browser.
    2. Desktop notifications from browser like we have in gmail on chrome.
    3. Set a time in seconds or auto-refresh dashboard after few seconds or minutes so the result gets updated.

    Otherwise a great service being provided by you guys.
    Thank you and keep it up.

    Remember me exists now.

    Yes, we are considering adding Chrome desktop notifications. Didn’t explore it technically yet but shouldn’t be hard I guess.

    And, we are working on making the dashboard fully real-time. Afree that it’ll make things much better.

    Thanks for your great service… It really saved me a few times…

    The new interface is great, the only thing I miss is the keep me logged option, specially for mobile devices.

    Uptime Robot is currently showing my club’s website as “down” … but I can open it ok and it seems to be working fine.

    I have been pinging it constantly for about two hours, while Uptime shows that it has been down twice during that time.

    I e-mailed the ISP with my concerns based these numbers, courtesy of Uptime …

    % up Downtime Outages
    22/10 24.208 18:11:24 3
    23/10 61.166 9:19:13 16
    24/10 47.507 12:35:54 23
    25/10 55.466 10:41:17 11
    26/10 65.453 8:17:29 9
    27/10 75.352 5:54:56 6 (as at c15:00)

    That’s a week-long horror story … if it’s true! But who do I believe?

    Any option available that can be used as a download function for creating performance reporting… would love to port direct to excel… also I would support a donation button… as this is such a good piece of kit…

    We are about to add responseTime data to the API and will be offering export feature for all the data as well.

    For the love of god, put a donate button on your webpage or create a donation plan with a yearly price of 0-40€, without any additional promises. Considering other similar services charger the sum per month for one site you guys make us feel bad.

    hi – great product. Cannot fault free. Unless you visit uptime robot every month and extract uptime/downtime data it appears lost. Latency information is only kept 24 hrs and an issue might need analysis well after that. We would pay a fee to get enhanced logging (historic availability, downtime and latency going back over months/years).

    Love this service. We are a non-profit and this is definitely the right price, but would certainly donate if you gave the option. Thanks for the great product!

    Cheers,
    Seth

    I also think the addition of a donate button would be a good idea for this great service. I only use it to monitor one site, my home, so I can keep an eye on the quality of my ISP connection – as I’m away a lot and get frustrated when I cannot tunnel into my home equipment.

    The ability to export the data would also be very useful and I look forward to this feature as it would help e look for trends in the data if I could graph it in Excel or Google Docs!

    It’s a really wonderful tool. Charge a fee and make it cheap:) – I will sleep better knowing that the site will be there for many years to come. Could use a few more features like downloading the data and changing time scale of the chart. Maybe the features are there and I don’t see it?

    So good to hear that you like it. The features are not yet available but we are working on them.

    Amazing service. If & when you go paid, I will be one of probably many to pay up happily.

    Premium plan for more (preferably unlimited) sites to monitor would be a great feature even now.
    Of course, the several-account workaround works fine 🙂

    I love this service, its a lifesaver really and use it heavily with an Android client to give me the quickest heads up.

    I really appreciate that the service is free and I agree with one off the comments here on the donations option. It would certainly be something I would be keen on for users to show their appreciation even if you aren’t planning on a premium service right now. 🙂

    Keep up the good work!

    Thanks for your amazing service. And it’s nice there are new features to improve Uptime Robot Service. thanks a lot..

    I e-mailed the ISP with my concerns based these numbers, courtesy of Uptime …

    % up Downtime Outages
    22/10 24.208 18:11:24 3
    23/10 61.166 9:19:13 16
    24/10 47.507 12:35:54 23
    25/10 55.466 10:41:17 11
    26/10 65.453 8:17:29 9
    27/10 75.352 5:54:56 6 (as at c15:00)

    Thank you for your amazing service. I really enjoy using this apps. Very usefull to monitor my website.

    Thanks again!!

    I have 3 websites that uptime robot all say go offline for various amounts of time (30 minutes this morning) but when I check the access logs for the times that it was supposedly offline there are thousands of hits from visitors so the emails are a false positive.

    I have three downtime checkers running and only uptime robot gives me these false positives.

    Really an awesome service. Hope it goes with the technological world because helps in comparing which is an excellent feature.

    I discover your service today, it seems to be awesome and useful services. I’ll try it asap and if work fine I’ll consider a donation too. Good work guys

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *