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already better than Free pingdom.
I really like the design and I am trying it with a couple of tests, but it seems to be reporting the opposite of reality. Shows one of my sites as down though it says Keyword Found and it shows the response time, while another one which is really down is shown as up:

http://cl.ly/image/1Y1U3b0z2U0U

http://cl.ly/image/3c0e38312a2W

edit: If it is of any use for debugging, these sites' IDs are: 775909552 (up) and 775909549 (down).

Seeing the same here. Maybe the CNAME is tripping it up.
Neither domain has a CNAME set up.
6 hour update. Now both sites are up but they are both listed as down and with "Keyword Found".

http://cl.ly/image/2L1V1A2K180f

Liking the service a lot by the way! That's why I am reporting what I find.

Dammit I was about to start developing something exactly like this... :(
So? Do it anyway. Competition stimulates demand and the fact you've got long-lived competitors indicates there's demand already. By coincidence I was literally about to sign up for Pingdom, but I'm going to try these guys out instead. If this had been your service, you'd have just had a new customer right now.

Your success will depend on the quality and efficacy of your marketing.

So was I - about 10 years ago. Registered the domain name, started working on the code and then realized there were 100 people doing it already. I mean, seriously, the code to do this is trivial to write.

So I mothballed it for a couple months and then got an unsolicited offer from a guy in Israel to buy the domain for $1,000. Easiest $990 I ever made.

There are loads of these kind of service monitoring services out there.
It's a fun way to learn about a good variety of things; http and other protocols, distributed architecture, how poor most sites' uptime truly is...

I built https://servercheck.in/ for that reason, and because I wanted cheap 'real' SMS notifications (from a consistent phone number) so I could set a special ringtone on my phone when one of my servers goes down.

This has been around for a while, but seems to have had a facelift recently. Looks much better!
I already love it, better than Pingdom.

FYI: I'd be willing to pay for SMS alerts (should be "straight forward" with Twilio) or might just work by linking the custom RSS feed to IFTTT...

It actually already does support this, as well as twitter and push notifications to iOS via Boxcar.

Just click 'Add Alert Contact'. Also seems pretty granular about which monitors report to what contact.

Been using this for awhile - its not bloated with a bunch of crud and it just plain works. Not bad for free.
One benefit of using this over Pingdom: they have a location in outside of the US and Europe (Singapore). If a networking issue causes your site to appear down for Japan, China or India Pingdom won't know.
I've been using it for about a year and it works well, haven't gotten any false positives yet.

It can do keyword checking as well as standard ping + port connect.

That's about all it does, which is fine by me.

It's free and it works.

I have been using this for a while on my servers. For some months, I had Pingdom and Uptime Robot monitor the same server. According to my experience, the latter has less false positives - with Pingdom, it sometimes looked as if it was monitoring its own network congestion, and not the availability of my websites.

Uptime Robot also has an API like Pingdom, but with the added benefit you can monitor up to 50 websites for free. The API allows me to almost never log in to the control panel, as I watch the status using my custom monitoring panels.

This. False positives are terrible. We monitor google & amazon along with our services. If us, google & amazon all look down, it's a false positive. Not sure why pingdom doesn't do this for us, but whatever.

(fwiw, we're moving off of pingdom too).

I've used Uptime Robot for a year now and it's awesome.
Very nice indeed. Just a bit of a pity that they don't support HTTPS :(
It seems to support HTTPs.. There's an option for it.
Where do you see the HTTPS option?
When I added a new check it says HTTP(s), then I just added the https:// for the domain I was checking. Works fine.
I think the comment was that the Uptime Robot website itself isn't served over HTTPS, not that it can't check HTTPS sites.
Right in time for a massive outage.
Looks like a patchwork of all of the wrapbootstrap themes. Love it.
Just signed up. Very nice interface, and it supports https for free!
i am using it from last 6 months, nice service :)
Is it designed for a much larger screen than mine (1280x800 at the moment, the max on my laptop)? I have both horizontal and vertical scroll bars showing up, even when putting it to fullscreen, and some areas still overlap so I cannot see the content (that "sort monitors" section for example).

Otherwise I set up two monitors, look interesting, useful, and well done! Good job!

Handy for keeping those free Heroku workers spinning.
Have been using http://copperegg.com probes for a while. I'd suggest them too. They have 15 second checks with various notifications.
+1 for copperegg. Their free plan is much better than uptimerobot. My only comment is that their UI is not overly intuitive, but you don't really have to look at it after you've set it up.
If you have something critical to monitor, my advice is to stay away from Uptime Robot. I've used them for a couple years along side my Pingdom checks. They often don't deliver notifications. My last notification is ".... resource is down. We'll notify you when it's back up." That was 10 days ago and it was down for a few minutes. I was never notified of it coming back up. This is just typical. It's also common that I never get a notification of a down resource, too.
+1. I tried Uptimerobot and Statuscake and had issues with both. Pingdom has on the other hand been 100%. It costs more but it works.
They seem to be having some odd errors in the signup that prevent it from showing it actually processed. Did get an email asking to verify the account so it sounds like its only a client side problem... seeing an error from jquery validation.
Kinda-sorta-related: 10 years ago this month, I quit my job to finish my first product: a server monitoring system that I ultimately never launched. I did a little writeup of it earlier this year: http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/esonar-resurrection

So every time I see a post, ad or anything about server monitoring systems, it makes me smile. It's one of those projects that everyone has: "One of these days, I'll work on it."

Me too! I will tell you why...

The off the shelf services will only get you so far, even with keyword search. Sometimes you just have to roll your own.

With a complex ecommerce build you can run into situations where something has gone badly wrong with the pricing, e.g. everything is marked up as on sale, price £0.00. With a roll your own solution you can build an XML tree of the document, go through your HTML tags and put in some rules to make sure that all the prices are greater than zero (for instance).

As for keywords, you want something on the page in the footer, however, that can change. Eventually I ended up using the content between the <noscript> tags as that really did not change (even though they were at the top of the page).

Sending out an SMS is not hard to do, however, now that people have email on the phone it is not really that useful plus your credits can run out.

A 'roll your own' solution with advanced content checks can be used with a standard 'Uptime Robot' type of service. Clients can have the 'Uptime Robot' and manage it themselves, they will get great peace of mind. Meanwhile, the homebrew check can give a developer a heads up on things going wrong before they go wrong (as far as the client is concerned) and pick up on more subtle failings that a client really doesn't need to be told about at odd hours of the night.

Depending on your traffic levels you may also want to remember to take the IP address of your check program out of your stats.

If anyone does want a very simple PHP script to iterate over a list of URL's (and their respective search strings), do the CURL thing and some DOM parsing, with SMS mailout of whatever the 50x fail is then I can find you one.

Definitely looks nicer than the old design. I just wonder what the heck it's doing at the top of hn?
Signup sends login credentials over HTTP and not HTTPS. Come on guys, it's 2013. A certificate isn't that expensive anymore.
Agreed on this one, HTTPS is not so hard.
Off topic: Where can I buy cheap certificate?
You can get your SSL certificate signed for free from http://www.startssl.com/ whose CA is included by default in all major browsers.

You just have to be able to receive email to webmaster@yourdomain.tld for that to work.

StartSSL is a pain in the ass if you're a business, and support sucks. Great for their personal certs.

GoDaddy is the cheapest, but I hate them. Use Namecheap.

Been using Namecheap for a number of our client sites. Have been very happy. No BS, just gets the cert to me quickly.
You can't use their free certificates for commercial purposes.
I read through startssl's ToS a while back but I'm pretty sure this wasn't in there. Has their policy changed or did I miss something?
It's always been there AFAIK. This is from their current policy document which you must agree to when you start applying for a free certificate:

> Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only. Subscribers MUST upgrade to Class 2 or higher level for any domain and site of commercial nature

Class 1 is "StartSSL Free", and Class 2 is "StartSSL Verified" which costs $59.90.

Geotrust (RapidSSL) isn't too expensive either.
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The extra dedicated IPs often cost more than the certificate.
Dedicates IP's aren't required for SSL certs anymore unless you're concerned with old IE's in Enterprise environments. Every modern piece of browser software will send the domain with the TLS handshake. Doesn't look like these guys are targeting the entrenched enterprise, though.
Windows XP is still running on about 1 in 5 computers in the US. Internet Explorer is still the first or second-most used browser depending on whose market share methodology you prefer. SNI does not work with any version of IE on WinXP. SNI also doesn't work with Safari on XP, Android 2.x browser, BlackBerry browser, Opera Mobile, etc. No major sites use SNI and it's not because they have enterprise audiences. The compatibility isn't there yet -- if you're using SNI, you're throwing up errors on the screens of 10% or more of your visitors -- desktop, laptop, home, "enterprise", and mobile alike.
You're assuming that the average user on their site = the average user on the internet.
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Giving error messages to people using IE on XP is probably a good thing. Web browsers need security updates, and they're about to be left out, in addition to facing rendering problems.

But even when you want to let people connect without SNI, there is no reason to skimp on security. How about sending people with bad browsers to a different port per site?

> How about sending people with bad browsers to a different port per site?

You can't do that for the very reason SNI exists. All you've got is the beginning of an SSL handshake on your single IP; you don't know what host they want yet, so you neither know what port to redirect to nor what certificate to serve.

The topic here is how the signup form is submitted. We're talking about starting with an http connection, so the server very much knows what port to redirect to.

And even if they bookmark the https, it keeps working.

And if they have something like 'https everywhere', then they're not using an obsolete version of IE.

The only failure point is if they click an https link by a third party.

The topic here is how the signup form is submitted.

Which protocol the form is submitted via is only half the security issue. The form itself needs to be served over https also to avoid a MITM attack on the destination of the form submission.

In theory if you're browsing a site over HTTP, the initial request to the form will be HTTP, and then you'll be 301'd to the secure signup form. A check could happen before the 301 is issued (instead displaying a warning message). That may not be how it is done on any given site, but my point is that it is possible to handle gracefully.

But yes, clicking an https link directly would cause issues.

Genuine questions: why does this service require a login? Why does it require a secure login?
You can tie private information, such as your telephone number (for SMS) and various emails to your account that you can associate with alerts on various reminders you set up.

It's bad practice to not use a secure login, because anyone who is sniffing HTTP traffic can see your Uptime Robot username and password in plaintext.

This might not be that bad for this website, but keep in mind how many people use the same email/password for other services, or their email.

prefix to my note: dude startssl certificate is fucking free.

you should be using a password manager and have unique for every service.

I do. Your typical user does not.
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Sign up process is shot. You click sign up. Nothing happens. You click again, e-mail is used.

Still have not received any e-mails.

I found the same thing. This occurs on forgot password as well. I refreshed to re-signup and it said email already exists. I went to forgot password and it didn't give me any kind of success/error messaging. I opened my Chrome dev tools and could see the AJAX requests being processed but there was an empty response on forgot password. I didn't receive emails for registration or forgot password, so I'm dead in the water.
Same here. No feedback at all after clicking Signup. Clicked repeatedly.
Looks like the signups are getting processed now, I just got mine and I signed up an hour ago.