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UptimeRobot 2020 Update: Acquisition, recent problems and future plans

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    👋 Hello everyone,

    Peter here, nice to e-meet you. Let me briefly introduce myself and share some insights about what has been going on with UptimeRobot lately and what the future plans are.

    I am one of the founders of itrinity, a Czech/Slovak company, which acquired UptimeRobot in late 2019.

    We are not your “typical” investors in expensive suits, but rather very passionate entrepreneurs and “indie-hackers” who are behind some globally recognized services like Mangools (popular SEO toolset including KWFinder) or Aukro (an #1 online marketplace in central Europe), and many more. We run these businesses and then use the generated profits to expand our portfolio.

    We work in relatively small, dedicated, and distributed teams with the direct involvement of us (the founders) in product development. No VC money, no outside push for high margins, and no looking for a quick exit. We are in this for a long time 👍.

    Alright, enough about us. Let’s talk about UptimeRobot!

    What is happening a.k.a. recent problems

    First of all, we would like to apologize for any issues you may face when using our services during these times 🙏. These issues mostly include various slowdowns and errors when visiting our website, dashboard, and status pages. So why is this happening?

    1. We have to deal with an increased amount of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.
    2. The number of actively running monitors grew by more than 1,000,000 in the last 6 months. That’s actually good as we want to offer our service to more customers. On the other hand, we have to scale our systems to handle such numbers and to prevent performance problems if there’s any big domain outage or when one of our IPs gets blacklisted by some of the hosting providers.
    3. There were many blacklistings by numerous hosting providers during the last months. In such cases, we have to rely on the reports from you, our customers, and proactively try to solve it directly with the provider.
    4. Our networking provider had to deal with some outages as well, and that affected our services too.

    How are we handling it

    We are working night and day to upgrade, improve, and scale our infrastructure and its critical parts as soon as possible. We are upgrading to a new DB cluster, which in itself will be a big improvement to the whole situation. As a response to those nasty DDoS attacks, we are upgrading our protection layers to better cope with them.

    We are also migrating our “inherited” Windows-based infrastructure to a newer Linux-based one, which will make it more stable, powerful, and easier to manage and monitor. During this migration, short outages might occur as some parts of the system will need to be restarted multiple times.

    Also, we are actively considering a change of our main infrastructure provider, but given the nature of UptimeRobot and the fact that we rely strongly on whitelisting of our IPs, it would be a very painful migration.

    Some exciting news

    We understand that these “behind-the-scenes” infrastructure updates may not be very exciting for all of you, but after a decade of UptimeRobot existence, this is very much needed. We have hired multiple talented people!

    There’s a lot to do, and we need any skilled pair of hands available 🙂. Engineers, customer support agents, and marketers, all of them will bring a lot for UptimeRobot in the coming months.

    BTW: We are still looking for high-skilled engineers and marketers! If you think you would be a good fit, contact us on info@uptimerobot.com.

    📱Mobile app

    The current mobile application for UptimeRobot is, for the lack of words, bad 😂. We are fully aware of that and we plan to redo it from the ground up, using a modern design language and technology stack (React Native) to provide an amazing UX.

    We also plan to improve the capabilities of what you can do via the mobile app. Our goal is to make the new mobile app your first choice to check the status of your monitors wherever you are. We would like to launch it in the Q4 of 2020.

    ✅ New monitoring features

    While sorting through the most common support tickets, we have identified several recurring problems/feature requests that would be a great addition to our monitoring service! These include:

    • Multiple accounts – Create sub-accounts to let your team members access and manage your monitors.
    • Email reports – Get regular summaries of your monitors and their uptime statistics.
    • Root causes of DOWN events – See a specific server response or even a screenshot of the page right from the Dashboard.
    • Status page subscriptions – Let your customers subscribe and get notifications when your status pages update.
    • Annotations – Keep a record of why a specific downtime happened.
    • Custom HTTP timeouts – Set a specific timeout value to mark your monitors as DOWN.

    💅 UI facelift & new brand identity

    A high-quality service has not only to work well, it should look great and provide an amazing user experience too. We are heavily focusing on this, starting by redesigning the brand identity (don’t worry, we will keep the original UptimeRobot spirit), landing pages, and public status pages.

    New UptimeRobot landing page
    Figure 1.: New UptimeRobot landing page

    There will be many more improvements in the near future. We really hope you will like them! Most of them could be ready by the end of 2020.

    The thought-process behind our new logo.
    Figure 2.: The thought-process behind our new logo.

    🎓 Community & education

    We are very fortunate to have such a huge base of amazing, emphatic, and enthusiastic customers from all over the world! We plan to improve our communication towards you, increase our social media presence, and start with a regular posting on our blog. We would like to hire a dedicated community manager whose job will be to keep our amazing community happy and up to date.

    A few last words

    We understand you might have some concerns regarding the recent technical issues, but we assure you that we are doing everything we can to handle them. Our goal is to provide a monitoring service of the highest quality for you, our beloved community.

    If you have any questions or feedback we will be happy to hear it! Reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter or via support@uptimerobot.com.

    Have a great day

    Peter

    74 replies on “UptimeRobot 2020 Update: Acquisition, recent problems and future plans”

    Thanks for this update, Peter. As a small business owned law firm, we rely solely on your service to detect outages for our two sites. Your communication was informative and encouraging. We are excited about the future for UR and keep up the great work!

    Hey Dan, thank you for your feedback! We are glad you appreciate it, we will do our best, promise 🙂

    I didn’t know the team behind Mangools are now behind UptimeRobot. That is super news, I love the Mangools stuff, and use it daily for customer projects. Keep up the good work, I look forward to see the improvements that you have mentioned!

    Hey Marty, thank you for reaching out to us! There’s no public roadmap available at the moment, but we will be informing you about the progress, mostly through our social media.

    Great that uptime robot is being taken care of.

    Personally, I am happy with the way things are. I have not experienced any issues. So if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

    However with a new owner changes are common, but that can be a disaster for loyal users. I would caution you to keep the changes to a minimum, or you risk losing the love of current users.

    Please keep the API the same. Please keep the pricing the same. Please keep public pages.

    You stated a lot of ambition but who is paying for this? I think it will be sad if you create extra cost for the sake of change, because you will need to recoup these and that will inevitably mean users will pay more. Can you provide a statement that charges will remain the same?

    Time to look for another uptime provider? I hope not.

    Hey Clappert, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, we appreciate your feedback. We understand your concerns and we definitely don’t want to lose the love of our community, but with the growth, some things just need to be changed for the better. We can’t promise you we will be the cheapest on the market, but we aim to be the best.

    > We can’t promise you we will be the cheapest on the market, but we aim to be the best.

    It may be a good idea to be very clear and upfront about your plans in this area.

    Lots of people use UptimeRobot not because it has the prettiest UI or the best reliability, but because it is free / cheap.

    > don’t worry, we will keep the original UptimeRobot spirit

    Fingers crossed!

    Hi Peteris,

    thank you for your feedback, we are currently upgrading our infrastructure and optimizing the service to make it as reliable as possible, we will also add some new cool features, we understand price is an important factor for many, but it’s the same with everything – the fastest and most reliable cars are not the cheapest, too 🙂

    A competitor of yours that is extremely reliable and has a very, very nice UX, costs only a little bit more than Uptime Robot currently does.

    It sounds like you guys want to increase the pricing by quite a bit. I advise caution with any price increase if you want to maintain your userbase.

    Thank you for your feedback, Douglas! Our aim is to have a very, very nice UX, too 🙂 and not only!

    Great to hear you’re enhancing your service!

    I use a lot of webhook monitors, and I have lots saying I’m reporting up state successfully to them every 5 minutes, yet every now and again they get flagged as down for several minutes at a time. There is no rhyme or reason to the reporting as my system has 100% uptime and whenever UTR says it’s down I hop on and check and it’s not? Will your updates fix this?

    Thanks!

    Hey Craig, thank you for reaching out to us! We can’t be sure what is the cause in your case, but if it’s on our end, it’s very possible it will be fixed with all the changes and upgrades. If not, please feel free to contact our support and we will be happy to take a look at it.

    Great to hear there’s some work done on the interface. My biggest problem is the short time of the login session. In reality, i’d just like to always have a tab open with all my sites on it. Call it a dashboard if you will. That’s the info I need all day.

    Hi Arjan, thank you for your feedback! We will keep it in mind. Have you considered setting up a public status page to see what’s going on 24/7?

    We use this on a computer hooked up to a large LCD display. We don’t use the TV Mode (which includes a 60 second refresh cycle) as I prefer to see more info and the list on the left. To update the page, we use an auto-refresher extension that refreshes the page every 30 seconds. This avoids the page timeout and will keep it live for you.

    Great update! We’ve been using Uptime robot as a small business for a number of years as part of a wider stack and found it immensely useful. Its really exciting to hear whats going on and looking forward to some of the new features in the future

    Hi Lucas, we are happy to see your feedback, thank you! We will do our best to provide the monitoring service you deserve.

    ..and now you have some cool arguments under your belt! 😀 Of course, we are sorry for any inconvenience, everything will be great soon.

    Ahoj, skvělá práce, nedávno jsem začal používat UptimeRobot pro své zákazníky a nejvíce žádaná věc je měsíční reporting. Doufám, že se brzo povede naimplementovat. 🙂

     Ahoj Mira, díky moc! 🙂 Veríme, že už brzo, tiež sa nevieme dočkať keď už bude všetko vonku. Ďakujeme za podporu!

    Hi there! We totally get you, some have even more monitors and we understand the sorting feature is not enough, we will add this for sure. Thank you for your feedback!

    Thank you for this Blog entry and the still exact and direct explanations.

    I really like your service and I run the dashboard on Raspberry PI over Balena to have all monitors in view 🙂 https://github.com/secanis/uptime-robot-dashboard

    May consider to also add an entry plan with 10…25 monitors.
    I don’t need 50 monitors but I would may pay for 10.

    Greetings

    Hi Matth,

    thank you for reaching out to us and sharing! We will reconsider our plans, but for now, no changes are planned regarding them 🙂

    Hey, Peter.
    Alex here. I’m running a number of non-commercial sites on a virtual hosting which is quite cheap and hence, can cause stability troubles.
    I’m relly struggling a lot with them for floating access time jumping for 1 to 6 secs. And that’s what I’m monitoring here besides timeout and 502 deny errors.
    So I would higly appreciate if I could have a longer timeline than 24 hours for response time which I could export.
    I fully rely on your project to monitor my sites and deliver better UX for my readers. Thank you for helping me in that non-commercial story!

    Hi ,

    it’s a real pleasure to work with your team for years.
    This is just THE best monitoring solution on the market for me.
    Teams looks very reactive & profesionnel , as well product is great .

    Great news for Custom HTTP timeouts which is definitively a must have functionallity .. waiting for years :=)

    Another small missing functionality for me is a 24h,48h repetition for notification which are missing ….
    Sometime I want a daily notification reminder for down status with low priority (or daily batch that can fix it by itself the next day)
    and currently this is not possible the maximuml is 60 mn 🙁

    Hey Stephane,

    thank you very much for your feedback! We really appreciate it. We will reconsider this feature request 😉

    I’d like to express interest in the group feature for organizing monitors more effectively. Any idea when this will become available?

    Hi there,

    this is planned for sure, it will be available this year when we are done with all the work, hopefully. Unfortunately, we can’t give you a more specific ETA at the moment.

    Hi , i monitor a website
    but when i add in dashboard i must select ping or http ?
    i want to monitoring uptime of my site

    Thanks for the update. I cant say im very impressed with the new logo though. My 2 year old could have designed something with a bit more thought behind it.

    All the best for uptimerobot

    Hi Jack, thanks for you feedback, the green dot is representing the “UP” time 🙂 We like the simplicity in that.

    Hi Kristian ,
    you’re welcome 😉

    One more thing that is missing and it will be a real a great imporvoment for us.
    When we setup a keyword check , if the monitor is down I do not have any information about the root cause.
    Could be 502, 404 , or just http 200 with keyword missing.
    So when the issue is intermitent this is just impossible to undesrtand
    the issue.
    For exemple today we receive http 404 notifcation for about 20/30 monitors and we suspect that issue was @ your side so I raise a ticket to your support.
    It was juste impossible to undesrtand that there was a 404 error with your system nototifications
    I discover 2h after that there was really an intermitent 404 issue at our side.
    I have discovered because one of your competitor alert me regarding the http status 😉

    99% of our monitors are using word check so this is really an issue.
    If you could just add the http status on notification it will be amazing and save me hours of downtime !!

    Take care.

    Hi Stephane, thank you for the detailed description, this will be added, too 🙂 Let us know if there is anything else on your mind. Have a great day!

    Great to know that there is growth on the horizon for UptimeRobot. The current platform is simple to use and has done great at monitoring our 30+ sites. I have had only a couple of issues with false positives for outages in the entire time using the service and the support team has been awesome when I have had to contact them. We have the TV Mode page up in our NOC so please do not get rid of that feature.

    Hey Kevin,

    thank you for your feedback! We are happy when you are happy 🙂 And we won’t get rid of the TV Mode, don’t worry.

    Have a great day!

    hi. can you please fix my 2 monitors. ever since 7/3/2020 it stopped notifying. i downed the server yesterday and after 30 minutes, my monitors on your server shows up. It is not working anymore

    Are there any plans to update the way webhooks are formatted? For example, Discord notifications are pretty barebones and could use a formatting facelift.

    Hi Douglas,

    thank you for bringing this to our attention, we will take a look at it!

    Have a great day

    Hi, we’re very interested in a feature to only get alerts after X consecutive failed responses. We’re trying to balance draining policies and alerts, and my infrastructure team is not happy to be woken up for self-healing problems 🙂

    Would be a big added value to us, and the minute anyone with that feature integrates natively with victorops, we’re on that service – be it yours, or someone else 😉

    Hi Casper,

    thank you for your suggestion! We will reconsider it, for now, with the Pro Plan, you can set to be notified once or more if the monitor is down for xy minutes.

    Let us know if there’s anything else we can assist you with!

    Are you going to allow us to white label the email notifications so that we can have our company signature in the email instead of Uptime Robot?

    A competitor of UR has website logon transaction monitoring. I hope you are planning to implement that. I have to use them for this instead of website transaction logging on UR, since you do not *yet* offer it.

    I can tell you the competitor’s initials are UT.

    =D

    Thanks,
    Hank

    Hi Hank, thank you for bringing this to our attention! It’s not our priority at the moment, but we’ll reconsider it in the future for sure. Let us know if you have any further ideas!

    just trying you guys out – ippatrol have just hung up their spurs forever – we were with them for blimey – 15 years i think so sad to see them go – lets go UR!

    Hi Tom,

    Welcome to the family! And thank you for your support, let us know if there’s anything we can help you with.

    Hi,

    Do you have any plan to add servers in EU for better latency mesurement in France for exemple (currently always more than 300ms) ?

    Thanks,
    Florent

    Hi Florent,

    thank you for reaching out to us. Our main checks are made from Dallas, US, then there are two other random checks made from around the world, you can find them all here: https://uptimerobot.com/help/locations/ Unfortunately, France is not between them and there are no plans in changing our current set of remote nodes in the near future.

    It’s great that UptimeRobot is doing all possible to upgrade all infra and look, but still keeping available to users. I (who monitors both of my servers and some shared resources) highly appreciate changes. Keep moving forward with you, guys! Great job!

    Well come November 2020 they did live up to there expectations the BRAND new UptimeRobot application on iOS is Amazing 😀 You’re services I don’t care you guys are hands down the f**** best. All that needs to be done is the UI on the site needs to be changed like the application. I don’t mind to pay more money but for what you get this is cheap 😀 Love you guys all the best.

    What you missed here is the desire to drive away free users.

    Glad to know uptimerobot was bought by a bunch of suits who claim to not be. Now I know to stop trying and go find another vendor.

    Thanks for ruining what was an awesome tool.

    Hi Andrew,

    thank you for your feedback, take a look at itrinity.com if you wish, you won’t find any suits 🙂 We would also appreciate some specific feedback so we know what to improve, what ruined the tool for you?

    Changing the status pages and putting the ability to get all the information back behind a pay wall.

    Messages on this blog and to support show the new company is unwilling to restore that functionality to free users. So what’s next? How long until this service is completely useless without paying up a ton of money?

    And when I do get to the level of requiring more monitors at better intervals, why should I give money to the company that turned it’s back to me?

    That is exactly corporate attitude/greed so you can sit here and claim no suits but you are wrong.

    Hi Andrew,

    sure, we’d love to offer everything for free if we could 🙂 But, unfortunately, that’s not possible. There’s a lot of features we already offer for free. Our lowest Plan costs only $8 per month, we appreciate your feedback, we just can’t afford to make everyone happy. Thank you for your understanding.

    If there’s anything else besides your comments or emails you’d like to add, we’ll be happy if you reach out to us on support@uptimerobot.com

    Is this website monitoring can monitor error 502 bad gateway from a website? or let say can this monitoring website recognize the 502 error?
    thank you

    Hi, yes, this error code is also included.

    These are all the codes considered as down, but you can customize them with PRO Plan:
    400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 421, 422, 423, 424, 426, 428, 429, 430, 431, 440, 449, 450, 451, 495, 496, 497, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 508, 509, 510, 511, 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 526, 527, 530, 598, 599.

    How many paid subscribers do you have? Are the paid and free service servers separate? Right now, I’m on my free charge. There are interruptions from time to time. I want to switch to paid.

    Hi there, there are no separate servers for different plans, but we have multiple servers so please contact our support in case you need any assistance and we will be happy to help.

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