UptimeRobot: know your site is down before your customers do

For most websites, UptimeRobot answers a simple question, “is my site up?”, and it answers it very well. Creating a monitor takes less than a minute, the interface stays readable even with dozens of sites, and alerts arrive quickly, including on your phone. It is exactly the kind of tool a freelancer or a small agency hooks up to all of its client sites to find out before the client calls.

Its free plan is especially generous in the number of sites it monitors, and it allows commercial use. Five minutes between checks is enough for a business website or a blog. You do need to know what isn’t included, though: no SSL certificate monitoring, no reminder before the domain expires, no slowdown alerts, and the history only goes back three months. For an online store or an app where every minute of downtime costs money, the Solo plan with one-minute checks quickly becomes the reasonable minimum.

Trust is another matter. The company has revised its terms several times in recent years, moved features that used to be included into paid tiers and imposed steep increases on some longtime subscribers. The current price lists are still affordable, but it’s best not to take today’s terms for granted. Alerts also sometimes fire for a site that is working fine: the double check from a second data center reduces the problem without making it go away. The cause is often a firewall, bot protection or a CDN that turns away the service’s probes; UptimeRobot publishes the list of its IP addresses, which you can allow with your host or in Cloudflare before concluding there’s an outage.

UptimeRobot monitors from the outside, without getting inside your application. It tells you a page has stopped responding, not why; to test a checkout flow or analyze slowdowns, you need a more comprehensive monitoring tool.