Today, Uptime Robot adds a new monitor type besides the http(s) and keyword checking: Ping.
It is actually the most basic command to find out if a network is up or down.
How does it differ from http(s)?
Http(s) monitoring sends a request to the web server and, in return, gets a status code from the server (like 200, 404, etc.). So, the server that the website hosted on can be up, other websites on it can be working but it may only be your website.
Ping looks for if the IP of your website is reachable or not. It is a better fit to monitor uptimes of servers/networks.
Should I use both http(s) and Ping for a website?
There is no need for that. If the aim is to monitor a website uptime, then http(s) monitoring should be enough as it’ll notify you when the server can not be pinged as well.
However, if you have a dedicated server or a VPS, using Ping for the server IP besides the websites on that server is a good idea.
This is also an important step for Uptime Robot as how monitor types are handled both on the frontend and backend are now changed to let us adding new monitor types easier :).
Hey,
Good work. Just a mail for appreciation.
Best Regards,
Arpit Singhi
That’s cool, I use ping a lot!
Hey I would like to know if yall can make a simple html thing that shows my customers what my status is because this is every 5 minutes. My other one that does that is every 30 minutes and I wanna get rid of that one as it is one that I didnt even have to register for. =)
Thanks,
Kenneth
Thank you very much for this improvements!!
Great work, thank you for your efforts. Your services work great and it is a perfect fir for our IT needs. Simple, but effective.
@Kenneth,
That feature is in the roadmap for the next update. Not giving an exact date to get embarrassed later but it won’t take long.
Thanks for the good work guys … you rock!
Will it check mysql server uptime as previous technology I request one feature for Indian users plz fix sms alert soon.
Sometimes the command ping is blocked.
What I’d like is a DNS monitor! You give it an address; it hits the DNS server there every N minutes. This would test notthe box being alive, al-la Ping, but the server is reponding.
@ Kenneth
I was wanting the same thing. I was thinking of integrating the twitter account to my website to solve that.
Thank you a lot for ping!
Please remove “http://” prefix in “URL” field for “Monitor Type Ping Monitoring”
Wating for SMS professional gateway option.
@Alexander,
“http://” in ping is optional as a user can choose to ping a URL as well.
Working on the pro SMS gateway.
It would be very useful to be able to monitor ssh and/or ftp ports as well. I have a few VPS that do not run http and some share an IP so pinging the IP doesn’t really help determine if the VPS is actually up.
Uptimerobot is just not reliable enough… Even when you add an IP like 255.255.255.255 or 0.0.0.0 it still will report uptime… Uptime that’s +/- 17%…
@lonic,
That was related to a bug on our ping monitoring which is totally fixed.