I’ve been using Pingdom for at least 3 years already because they provide really good service and also the 1 minute checks from locations all over the world. I used to have problems sending SMS as notification and Pingdom’s support team fixed the problem really quick plus they even compensated more SMS credits to my account. I’ve always been using the Basic account because that is the cheapest plan they had back then. It’s pretty much a waste since I only have one blog site to monitor when the basic account offers checks on 5 websites.
My Pingdom account has just expired end of February and was billed $119.40 for a new invoice. I’ve just paid few thousand dollars for a years’ dedicated server at NetDepot and is really feeling the pinch for fork out another hundred bucks for a monitoring service. Moreover Adsense has stopped serving ads to this website and the revenue that is generated from other advertising companies is barely enough to cover the cost of this server. So I canceled my Pingdom account temporarily and thought that maybe I will re-sign up again at a later time when I have enough funds.
To my surprise I found out that Pingdom has started offering FREE accounts along with 20 SMS but limited to only monitor ONE website. Pingdom Free account is fine with me because I only have 1 website to monitor and can save money.
What I like about Pingdom is the control panel is easy to use and understand and most importantly it does 1 minute checks from different locations around the world. For me, I set Pingdom to check for a certain keyword on my blog site every minute and only notify me via SMS and email if detected 11 consecutive check errors (10 minutes).
Other than checking for downtimes, Pingdom can also check how responsive is your website. Even if you only have FTP or mail server, Pingdom can check TCP ports (21 for FTP) and also SMTP, POP3, IMAP. The TCP port check makes it possible to check nearly everything including a game server such as Counter-Strike that is normally on port 27015.
The important requirement to keep your free Pingdom account alive is to log in to the Pingdom control panel at least once every 90 days. If you’re not good at remembering things, the easiest way is to install a free app by Pingdom called Pingdom Desktop Notifier that runs in the background and notifies you if your website is down. This application connects to your control panel so you can get more information about an outage and access more Pingdom features such as our various reports.
If you think about it, you can register 5 free accounts and you’re able to monitor 5 websites. It’s doable but it’s wrong under Pingdom’s terms of service. One of the terms is “Only one free account per person or legal entity is allowed“. If they catch you using two or more free accounts, you will risk your accounts being terminated. Blacklisting your account is fine because you can always use a new email address and contact information, just don’t blacklist the IP or website that you want to monitor…
So far I can’t find any better free uptime monitoring service than Pingdom. Sign up FREE Pingdom account from this link.
I came across a service provider “Monitor Scout” which uses internet protocols like PING, HTTP, IMAP, POP3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, DNS, VNC, FTP, TCP, RDP, SSH, DNS, UDP, SMTP and MAIL DELIVERY.
monitorscout.com
please follow this link to sign up for free trial.
is pingdom account is 100% free?
so, if i want to stop use pingdom, without paying,
what have i do?
thax for U’r answer~
I am using Pingdom too. It’s great but some times the security policies of certain Hosting Companies could trigger a problem.
Since the day I started using Pingdom with it’s default 5 minutes check, I started to receive frequent down alerts for my blog. I checked with the hosting company several times but they denied any down time.
Later on I found out that the firewall guarding my web server has a automatic mechanism which blocks the IP address of any outside host that makes concurrent connections in a short period of time.
Since I was using 5 minutes check resolution Pingdom was making concurrent connections to my web server once in every 5 minutes. The firewall misunderstood this to be a suspicious act and blocked pingdom frequently.
Pingdom had no idea that it’s being blocked by a firewall and can’t get to the site. Thus reported to me as the site is down.
There are two things you can do to solve the problem. Either asking your web host to white-list the Pingdom network range that makes these connections or adjust the check resolution to 15 minutes or more via your Pingdom account settings.
I’ve just set up a basic service to to just this. More as a learning experience than anything else.
pingalive.com
It’s in beta atm but is free. Give it a try and let me know if you have any suggestions, improvements etc.
I am also using Pingdom’s desktop app and i am quite impressed with it.
This is really awesome! Just got my Pingdom account!! Thank u so much!!
May i ask y Adsense stopped serving adds to this site? if u can answer….
have 1
Thanks.
Just added my site.
nice offer and thanks for the post.
Great offer and service by pingdom. Thanx Mister Raymond !
Et salutations de Genève !
i like your services
Thanks Ray!
I just signed up
yeah me 2 facing the same problem as of vicky,,,,,,,,ur posts are not normal in mails,,,,,,,,,,
I am using it already. It’s a very cool service…
why doesn’t ur post appear normal in the email as it used to be? Its like:
“.adHeadline {font: bold 10pt Arial; text-decoration: underline; color: #0000FF;.adText {font: normal 10pt Arial; text-decoration: none; …”
So I have to visit your website each time to read the article. Also, the full article’s not appearing in the email anymore. Its just an excerpt.
wow..
that great offer and service by pingdom… i want to try this
Nope , you are second and I’m THIRD !
Thanx for u info. I’am First!!!! ;_)
Is there any news on XRay?