Uptime Robot startled me by changing to paid services for anything useful - any alternatives

TidBITS Talk
1

Today I got a surprise email. Uptime Robot, which has always prided itself on continuing a free level of service to monitor sites, all of a sudden will start charging if more than one person (anybody but the account owner) needs to be notified that a site is down.

I’m curious what the alternatives are that people here recommend, now that I’ll apparently have to start paying anyway.

One other thought: have all the notifications come to my address and depending on the subject forward them to multiple people. Is that easy to do with a Gmail account? What about with my iCloud.com address. Does that allow for easy forwarding to multiple people?

Thanks,

doug

2

I had an issue with Uptime Robot about a year ago where they could not see my location, although it was online. I moved our service to Better Uptime. I have a free account with them and it has been working well.

3

It looks quite interesting. But is also pretty expensive. I wonder if the best method might be to somehow stick with Uptime Robot and funnel everything into my single Gmail account and in there use filters to forward different monitor results to different people. Hmm… Still thinking.

4

If you want to self host something (you can add it to Home Assistant, if you use that), this is free: GitHub - louislam/uptime-kuma: A fancy self-hosted monitoring tool

1 Like
5

While it looks interesting, it looks way too complicated to set up the notifications. At least for me.

It might be easiest to find some free plan somewhere even if it only allows one notification email address and then try to forward from that address to multiple recipients, depending on the monitor subject. That should be possible, don’t you think?

6

Should be. Here is one service that might fit your requirements: Why StatusCake? - StatusCake

7

Thanks. I’m taking a look at it. 24 hours support is “out” at the moment, but I left a message. I think. Their site doesn’t work well via mobile, but it works ok from my Mac.

Their copyright date in the footer still hasn’t been updated from 2022, so I wonder if they are keeping everything up-to-date.

Anyway, trying to check it out.

Thanks.

8

Host an instance of Uptime Kuma at PikaPods. Uptime Kuma is actually as easy to setup as Uptime Robot, yet has many more features. NTFY is also a sweet notification feature, which is built-in.

9

I’d never seen pikapods before. What a clever site!

What stopped me when I looked at Uptime Kuma’s demo was that setting up the notifier seemed really grody. Like you had to connect it with a mail server elsewhere to send the notifications? You don’t need to do that with Uptime Robot. They use their mail system.

With Uptime Kuma at pikapods how does that work?

10

You are correct. Email notifications do require setting up an SMTP server but that shouldn’t deter you from taking a look. Uptime Kuma offers a crazy number of notification methods, Slack, Telegram, NTFY and many others. Not sure which email service you are using but you can probably easily setup the SMTP settings to handle the notifications. Worst case, there are also numerous SMTP services available, specifically for these type of uses. I’m happy to help if you need further suggestions.

1 Like
11

I actually have multiple SMPT servers I run in different domains, so I could use one of those. I’ll give it a try! Thanks.

Doug

12

I set up an Uptime Kuma instance at Pikapods and created a monitor. But unlike Uptime Robot I don’t see an option to check for keywords on the page being checked. They don’t have that feature?

Thanks,

doug

13

Do you know why both have to be set for outgoing email?

image

I tried a test without setting the port and it was successful. But it wouldn’t let me save the setting without setting a port.

Thanks,

doug

14

I’ve not tried the feature but doesn’t the ‘HTTP(s) keyword’ option do the keyword searches?

16

I believe in this case the port is 465 and the Security is TLS. You could also set Security to None or STARTTLS

17

I don’t see an HTTP(s) keyword option setting when editing a monitor. Do you?

Thanks,

doug

18

So since I set the security to TLS (465) doesn’t that automatically imply the port number? I wonder why I had to set that separately.

Also, is there an Uptime Kuma support forums somewhere so I don’t have to keep on bothering you about it? :slight_smile:

It looks interesting though, and I’m tempted to try it.

Thanks.

19

Here is how you can add a keyword option. There is no forum for support, just the GitHub repo and reddit.

Image
Image610×1053 60 KB

20

Ah. Missed that. Thanks!

21

For Uptime Kuma, the notifications work, but I’m having trouble customizing them.

For example, if I set the subject:

image

Then test by “flipping upside down” then what arrives is the service name, but then it literally includes {{URL}} in the subject - not the actual URL that was being tested. Any idea why?

And is there a way of customizing the body?

Thanks,

doug