Are you in search for an simple monitoring service that will provide you with status updates for your service and don’t want to pay in gold for it? You also don’t want to maintain your own server with services like Icinga or Nagios? Search no more, here’s updown.io, simple, easy to use yet powerful, tiny monitoring service.

Although updown.io can’t be compared to Nagios, Icinga or similar services feature wise it is pretty powerful on its own and provides you with benefits such as transaction times, checks from multiple locations etc.

Its simple to use interface looks like:

It is pretty much self-explanatory and very easy to use. From the left side, by clicking on drop-down icon, you can select which protocol to use when performing the check:

After that you specify your domain name or IP address, select time interval in which checks should be performed, your satisfactory response time and you’re good to go.

There are of course a few more options that can be selected to better adjust monitoring checks. At the time of writing this article there are following options that can be changed/adjusted to better tailor your needs:

Protocol:

  • HTTP - check service on port 80 with http request
  • HTTPS - check service on port 433 using https request
  • TCP - send plain TCP request
  • ICMP - ping :-)

You can specify if response needs to contain some specific string with “contains” option

Check interval:

  • 30 seconds
  • 1 minute
  • 2 minutes
  • 5 minutes
  • 10 minutes

Satisfactory response time (response time you’re satisfied with):

  • 0.125 sec
  • 0.25 sec
  • 0.5 sec
  • 1.0 sec
  • 2.0 sec

You can additionally specify monitoring locations, currently there are 8 available monitoring locations:

  • Los Angeles, US
  • Miami, US
  • Montreal, Canada
  • Gravelines, France (lacks IPv6 capabilities)
  • Frankfurt, Germany
  • Singapore
  • Tokyo, Japan
  • Sydney, Australia

Nice thing is, no matter how many locations you select price of the check stays the same. Additionally, they have very nifty way of charging you for the service. Basically they charge you per performed check. One check costs one points. If you monitor your server every 30 seconds, and you have let’s say 2 servers to monitor that will cost you 4 credits per minute.

Which leads me to their pricing. Basically, you just select how many credits you want to buy, when there are no more credits on your account service stops. Nice! You can pay with credit card, paypal and even bitcoin! There is also a way to contact them to arrange different kinds of payment.

Larger the pack of credits you buy more you get for your money. Pack of 200k credits costs just 5€ and 10M credits are 100€ (European Euro, funny money ;-) )

Again, if you want simple, hassle free yet powerful monitoring service updown.io is way to go.