UptimeRobot
Hosted checks from outside your network, with a free tier that is actually usable.
UptimeRobot is the hosted answer, and it solves the one problem no self-hosted monitor can: it watches your site from outside your own infrastructure, so when your server, your network or your data centre goes down, the thing telling you about it is not also down. The free tier is unusually generous — 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals, email alerts and a public status page — which is more than enough for most personal sites and small businesses. Paid plans add 30-second checks, SMS and voice alerts, and multi-location verification to cut false alarms. It is proprietary and hosted, which is why it scores where it does; it is on this page because external monitoring is a real requirement and pretending otherwise would not serve the reader.
What it does well
- +Checks from outside your network — the one thing self-hosting cannot do
- +Free tier covers 50 monitors, which is genuinely enough for most people
- +Nothing to install, patch or keep running
- +Multi-location verification cuts false alarms from transient network blips
Where it falls short
- −Proprietary and hosted — you do not own the monitoring or its history
- −Free tier is capped at 5-minute checks, so a short outage can be missed
- −SMS and voice alerts are paid add-ons
- −Your uptime data lives in a third party's system
UptimeRobot as an alternative to
Where UptimeRobot shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
UptimeRobot head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.