UptimeRobot Alternative

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Uncategorized • 07 May 2021

Recently Uptime Robot modified their Free Tier to no longer include custom domains.

The main reason is the huge load on our systems and the issuance and renewal of SSL certificates hitting several 3rd party service rate limits while slowing down the process of activating new Status pages significantly

From the get go this sounds like a load of baloney to me, but it is what it is. As a result of this though my status page no longer resolves to my status page I have with them, they did provide notice of 8 days (5 business days) to find something else though, which I guess was nice of them… 🙄

# Requirements

I had a few specific requirements that I needed, this is something I’d rather not pay for if I can get away with it as I don’t really need it, but it’s nice to get alerts that my websites or services are down, albeit not many people use them.

  • Must allow Custom Domain
  • Must have HTTPS for Custom Domain
  • Must allow at least 10 monitors
  • Must allow monitoring based on keywords (for snwapi)

# Freshping

I had a look at Freshping, which is a good alternative but it didn’t have HTTPS for Custom Domains. It’s 2021, Lets Encrypt is a thing, it just seems a bit lazy and stupid to force you into a paid system just to have free SSL certificates, especially since the tier required is $35 a month! 🤯 Had they included SSL in the free tier, it would’ve been a winner straight away based on lower check times of 1 minute, more monitors, more status pages and a bunch of other benefits, but alas, I moved on to my next one.

# Better Uptime

I ended up deciding on Better Uptime. The service is very similar to what Uptime Robot was previously supplying before May 2021, it allows up to 10 monitors, what I’d consider much nicer downtime reporting that requires you to acknowledge the incident before it stops reminding you, email alerts, 3-minute checks etc. If you upgrade to the lowest paid tier of $24/month billed yearly, it brings the checks down, the monitors up and also includes phone call alerts which I think, is pretty fancy, if I ever needed it. You can see all the pricing and features here

It does include an iOS app as well, which to receive push notifications you need to pay for, but MS Teams and Slack interaction is included in the Free Tier.

I’ve only been testing this for a few days but so far it seems like a pretty good alternative which I had to find with less than 14 days notice. Had the notice been longer, and Uptime Robots reasoning not been as ridiculous as it was, I’d have probably subscribed to their paid tier, but hey, these things happen.

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