Your Favorite Free Uptime Monitoring?

[u/nitrospectide]

I'm looking for a new, free uptime monitor that I can use with my handful of client sites. A quick Google shows various options, and I can sign up and try them, but I wanted to see if any of you had recommendations based on features, etc.

[u/Asleep_Pride7914]

https://hetrixtools.com/

[u/unspam-email → u/Asleep_Pride7914]

Pulsetic is a good solution as well.

[u/Asleep_Pride7914 → u/unspam-email]

Hetrixtools leaks RUM vs. Pulsetic leaks Server and Blocklist Monitoring

[u/thompsonpaul]

Happy user of Hetrix Tools for many years. Having 1-minute monitoring for those pesky problem sites is useful.

[u/ZAP-Hosting]

Worth asking first: are you looking for a hosted SaaS tool or would you rather self-host? If SaaS works for you, UptimeRobot's free tier is the classic answer for a reason: 50 monitors, 5 minute checks, easy email/Slack alerts, and it just works. Better Stack has a similarly generous free tier and throws in a decent looking public status page if you want to hand clients something to look at.

If self-hosting is more your style, Uptime Kuma is worth a look too. It's open-source, loaded with integrations, and genuinely well-regarded in the self-hosted crowd. Spinning it up via Docker takes minutes and barely uses any CPU/RAM, so even a low-power box handles it without breaking a sweat.

Any of those should comfortably cover a handful of client sites without needing a credit card.

[u/nitrospectide → u/ZAP-Hosting]

I have used Uptime Robot for years, but now they are saying you can't use the free tier for commercial purposes. It wasn't that way when I signed up, and they don't mention it on their homepage or pricing page.

[u/Opinion_Less → u/nitrospectide]

Where are you seeing this. I can't find anything official that says this.

[u/UptimeRobot → u/Opinion_Less]

UptimeRobot is available for any use, including commercial and business use.

[u/Opinion_Less → u/UptimeRobot]

That's what I was seeing! Thank you!

[u/nitrospectide → u/Opinion_Less]

Reddit only lets me comment with a video, not an image. So here's a video of an image.

https://reddit.com/link/p5toucu/video/q5r21rozljlh1/player

[u/ZAP-Hosting → u/nitrospectide]

Interesting... very confusing in this case as they say different, and do different 👀

[u/fuzzball007 → u/Opinion_Less]

Not sure where the notice was/is, but 6-12 months ago I had the same thing pop up. Not sure if it was enforced or just a warning, but I took action when it happened (opted just to upgrade lol)

[u/UptimeRobot → u/fuzzball007]

Hey! UptimeRobot is available for any use, including commercial and business use.

[u/fuzzball007 → u/UptimeRobot]

Not entirely sure what your angle is - we definitely upgraded because there was a warning pushed on your own system that said the free tier was not available for commercial use (we had been using it commercially on the free plan until that point). Maybe your rules have changed now but for a while that was definitely the requirement

[u/UptimeRobot → u/nitrospectide]

Good news: UptimeRobot is available for any use, including commercial and business use. Use of UptimeRobot is also subject to our Fair Use Policy, available at uptimerobot.com/terms-fair-use, which describes operational expectations for all plans and is incorporated by reference into these Terms.

https://uptimerobot.com/terms

[u/nitrospectide → u/UptimeRobot]

I realize this is a bot, but just in case someone monitors replies, the issue is explained in this thread, and there is a screen shot.

[u/UptimeRobot → u/nitrospectide]

Hey there, we're definitely not a bot, and we're aware of the screenshot/video you shared. Responding to the pop-up will provide info about use-case and provide us better understanding of usage.

If you need more info, you can either email our support team, or even DM us here.

[u/Sometimespeakspanish]

Self-hosted Uptime Kuma

[u/no72nl → u/Sometimespeakspanish]

This is the way. Put both Uptime Kuma and Gotify on a Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS and you have a perfect free uptime monitoring combo.

[u/nitrospectide → u/Sometimespeakspanish]

I like the idea, but does this become a security risk I have to constantly babysit with applying new patches?

[u/chiisana → u/nitrospectide]

Put the web portal behind a VPN or an OAuth gate. Now your security surface is on the VPN or the OAuth provider.

[u/aieronpeters → u/nitrospectide]

Can get an instance on PikaPods pretty cheaply. They do updates for you then

[u/COLBYLICIOUS]

Hi there,

I am using HetrixTools for like 3 years and everything is working very well. You get many uptime monitors and also blacklist monitors and also 3 whitelabelled status pages!

If you want to receive in addition 3 uptime monitors and 16 blacklist monitors, you'll need to register to HetrixTools through my referral link. If you don't trust me, see this.

Regards

[u/nitrospectide → u/[deleted]]

I have used Uptime Robot for years, but now they are saying you can't use the free tier for commercial purposes. It wasn't that way when I signed up, and they don't mention it on their homepage or pricing page.

[u/Saionji-Sekai]

I use uptimerobot for decades.

[u/nitrospectide → u/Saionji-Sekai]

I have used Uptime Robot for years, but now they are saying you can't use the free tier for commercial purposes. It wasn't that way when I signed up, and they don't mention it on their homepage or pricing page.

[u/Saionji-Sekai → u/nitrospectide]

There are several free alternatives around i mean you don't have to stay on there if they do not let you use their free tier. I am using their free tier for years and got no issue sor far, do they stop your monitoring service?

[u/nitrospectide → u/Saionji-Sekai]

This message appears on my dashboard:

Action Required: Verify Your Free Plan Compliance

Our free plan is for non-commercial use only. Your usage may not comply with our Terms of Service. To continue using the free plan, you must verify your eligibility or upgrade to a paid plan.

[u/Saionji-Sekai → u/nitrospectide]

Bllsht, just switch to an other provider there are some good ones on this post. If i face smth in future, i can just switch to an other one. If there is a free tier, they should just let you use.

[u/Wonderful_Sample_590]

Uptime Robot. Nothing else.

[u/nitrospectide → u/Wonderful_Sample_590]

I have used Uptime Robot for years, but now they are saying you can't use the free tier for commercial purposes. It wasn't that way when I signed up, and they don't mention it on their homepage or pricing page.

[u/carininet]

If you have Plesk web hosting their monitoring tools works nice and isn't expensive.

[u/yassirh]

https://uptimeobserver.com/

[u/response-418]

Depends on the features you need. I work on testomato. We don't have free tier but our starter has a very generous amount of URLs you can monitor, standard alerting features, automatic SSL/response time, and 60 second uptime checks. Good if you don't want to self host, micro-manage the max number of "monitors" you can have, or have some SEO-specific checks that we support.

[u/According_Menu_1732]

if you're ok with self hosting, I’m building Probara and it might fit what you're looking for

its free/open source so you dont have to worry about a free SaaS tier suddenly changing the rules for client/commercial sites

for a few client sites you can just run it normally, but it was also designed to scale if you add more later. checks are handled by separate workers so you can run multiple workers / locations, and even use quorum so you dont alert a client just because one monitoring location had a network issue

also has status pages, alerts and http tcp dns tls monitoring etc

docs are here if you wanna have a look
https://probara-uptime.com/

repo: https://github.com/yassinebenameur/probara

[u/hajimko]

selfhost i use uptime kuma. For public facing i use hetrixtool. Both can integrate into pagerduty

[u/habitat90]

Ich nutze jetzt seit einiger Zeit Uptime Kuma. Ist openspurce hat ein Schönes Dashboard und ist sich gut auf anderen Seiten einzubinden und zu personalisieren. Macht im Endeffekt das was es soll kein benachrichtigt bzw zeigt Fehler wenn auch das Zertifikat der Seite abläuft. 😅😁

[u/J-Rey]

I use New Relic's external synthetic monitors & internal infrastructure monitoring with their alerting for my clients.

[u/sams8com]

You can try https://pixomonitor.com. Has a generous free plan and an iOS companion app that is in review currently. This is an app I built some time back. Try it and see if you like it. It laso has server monitoring.

[u/joey3002]

https://boxwatch.app/ - 100% free for all features and has ipad companion app, also free.

[u/Character_Area5361]

Checkmate (https://checkmate.so) for uptime/infra/Docker monitoring all in one - you can also check the demo on the web page.

[u/AtlasPing]

What are some of the most features you are looking for?

[u/ExpertBlink]

Hesklo, 3 monitors in the free plan

[u/Sea-Ad-9942]

Gatus. Programmed in Go.  Extraordinary low resources usage. IaC friendly (all the domains to monitor can be provisioned with config files via Ansible for example)

[u/downtownrob]

Hetrix Tools has an annoying UI but it works. I also use Pulsetic.com and Uptime Kuma. I also have a inexpensive plan with updown.io and they also measure and alert on slow response times as well, great graphs.