Pingdom announced today they will discontinue the free tier of their website uptime monitoring service.
As of 6 February 2019 people using the free plan will no longer be able to use the service.
The free uptime monitoring has been offered since 2009 – along side the paid plans. It allowed one website to be monitored for uptime – providing email alerts for outages, as well out tracking response speeds.
Until 6 February 2019 free users will have full access to the service so they can experience everything it has to offer. They’ve also offered a limited time 50% discount for upgrading to a paid tier.
This change comes five years after SolarWinds took over Pingdom. Through this time they’ve added a number of improvements to the service but have made this move to “focus our resources and investment on this next phase of our product development”.
The decision to drop the free tier has caused some disappointment in the sector with many small websites not being able to justify the expense of the paid service.
The paid service starts at $11.95 USD a month – much more than entry level shared hosting or VPS hosting, making it hard for many to justify the expense.
Similar free uptime monitoring
If you’re looking for a similar free uptime monitoring service there are a few options:
If you’re looking for something you can host and manage yourself you could also use PHP Server Monitor – just make sure you host it on another server, preferable with another host, so it doesn’t go down when your services do!
PHP Service Monitor features:
- unlimited service and website monitoring
- email, SMS and Pushover.net notifications
- history graphs of uptime and latency
- customise your own monitoring frequency