Pingdom Review

For the last month, or so, I’ve been playing around with a trial account on Pingdom. One day I saw that Pingdom had hit one of my sites, so out of curiosity, I decided I’d go see what it was all about, and what exactly it did.

Pingdom is a web app, that monitors the uptime of websites, web servers, mail servers, and that sort of thing. For me Pingdom has been really easy to use and it works great. The whole point of Pingdom is to track downtime, and it does just that.

So I started a trial account, it gave me 30 days, to try out everything out, and I must say that it’s worth upgrading. Through the trial, I’ve been tracking two sites, and Pingdom has done a great job at keeping an eye on things. I have it set to check my sites every 5 minutes, and then it takes the data, and it puts it into a nice pretty graph.

You can configure Pingdom to ping your servers in many different ways, you can do different servers, different frequency of checking, and that sort of thing. So what I thought I would do is just give you a list of the options, and sort of elaborate on them.

• Check resolution: Pingdom allows you to configure how often you want to check for uptime. So it allows you to ping at certain intervals. The options are 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 60 minutes.
• Check type: You can choose what kind of check you would like to have, you can choose between HTTP, or TCP checks. If you choose HTTP, Pingdom will check your actual webpage, to make sure nothing is missing from it. If you choose TCP, Pingdom will just ping to the server, to see if it is up.
• Notification: You can notify just about anyone about your downtime status. You can add people to an address book, and then from there you can put a check in a box, for pingdom to notify that person. Also you can notify with either Email, or SMS messaging, which if you ask me, is really cool.

That explains the ‘Checks’ options. So here’s what the reports actually look like, for the uptime graphs.

Now that you know what it does, what does it cost? Pingdom charges $9.95/month. This really isn’t that bad, and right now they have an upgrade deal. When you create a trial account, you can upgrade at a 70% discount. So prices are $2.98/month, or $35.82/year. It’s a really good deal to snag, especially when a year of Pingdom, usually costs $119.

So if you are looking to keep an eye on your website’s downtime, and you are really into statistics, I think that you should give Pingdom a try. Even if you’re not a stats buff, this is a service you need.