I've mentioned UptimeRobot a few times. I use it as a monitor for the websites I host.

A kind reader has suggested "Down or Not" from Website Planet. It's nice, and gives a pretty quick response whether the URL you provide answers to the request. It gives a little preview of what it got and some metrics about the response.

It isn't the same thing. "Down or Not" is interactive, so you have to visit and ask it to check your site. I can get that from my content gateway if I don't trust that my phone or computers are accurately telling me that my sites are up. It also makes you enter each domain separately to check more than one; my CDN gives me a dashboard with all my fronted domains, and my servers and analytics engines give me more details. When I need an interactive "is it working" check, this isn't the tool I choose.

The note I received opined that UptimeRobot was not user-friendly or fast. I beg to differ. Yeah, their user interface is a bit spartan, but everything you need is there. And its use case is different. It isn't there to test interactively, although it can, and it doesn't collect a current view. I use UptimeRobot and others to continuously monitor my servers and services, and more importantly, alert me if things go awry. OK, "continuously" means to check every now and again, and "awry" means if it notices an error a few times in a row. This is all configurable, and if you know what you're doing, configuring it in the spartan interface is easy, and doesn't require much more interface.

It allows up to 50 monitors for free, checking each every 5 minutes, and more sites and more frequently if you pay a reasonably (arguably?) small fee. The fee also improves the messaging options and monitoring intervals and adds configuration options, too. UptimeRobot is friendly enough, and it is fast enough that it'll tell me when a server goes down within moments of me starting some maintenance.

I do pay that small fee, and leverage some of the extras they offer. That might be part of the responsiveness I see; a 60 second monitor is appreciably more noticeable than a 5 minute interval. Peeking just now I see they changed their plans, and I'm between their current "solo" and "team" offerings.

I appreciate the suggestion, and if they offer different or more service, I'd be happy to look. I'll probably look again at other services, too, seeing the rate change on this one.