Guide

How to choose an
uptime monitor

There are dozens of monitoring tools. Most of them do the same thing. Here's what actually matters when picking one.

The 5 things that matter

1. Check frequency

How often does the tool check your site? 5 minutes means you could be down for 4 minutes 59 seconds before anyone knows. 1 minute is better. 30 seconds is ideal for production APIs.

What to look for: 3 minutes or less on free. 1 minute or less on paid. If a tool only offers 5-minute checks on free, your downtime detection is slow.

2. Alert speed

Check frequency is half the equation. The other half: how fast does the alert reach you after a failed check? Some tools batch alerts. Some have slow email delivery. The best tools alert within seconds of detection.

What to look for: Email alerts that arrive within 1 minute of detection. Slack/Discord webhooks that fire immediately. Avoid tools that say "alerts may be delayed during high load."

3. False positives

Nothing destroys trust faster than being woken up at 3am for a false alarm. Single-location monitoring is the #1 cause — if the monitoring server has a network blip, your site looks "down" even though it's fine.

What to look for: Multi-location verification (check from 2+ locations before alerting). Or at minimum, a confirmation check before firing the alert.

4. Pricing transparency

Some tools advertise "$29/month" but that's per seat, plus add-ons for more monitors, plus overage charges. Read the fine print. "Free for non-commercial use only" isn't really free if you have a business.

What to look for: All-inclusive pricing per tier. No per-seat charges. No surprise add-ons. A free tier that's genuinely usable for real projects.

5. What you don't need

If you just need "tell me when my site is down," you don't need APM, log aggregation, distributed tracing, AI-powered incident analysis, or on-call rotation scheduling. Those features cost money and add complexity. Most small teams need a URL checker with email alerts.

What to look for: A tool that does monitoring well, not a platform that does 10 things okay. You can always add observability tools later when you need them.

Questions to ask before signing up

"Can I use the free tier for my business website?"

"What happens when I hit the monitor limit?"

"Do alerts fire on the first failed check or after confirmation?"

"What's the total cost at 50 monitors? 100 monitors?"

"Can I export my data if I want to switch later?"

"Is there a status page included or is that extra?"

Our take

We built OpenPing because the simple tools got expensive or disappeared. Freshping died. UptimeRobot restricted their free tier. The remaining options are either too expensive for what they offer or too complex for what most people need.

Our answer: 25 free monitors, 3-minute checks, email alerts, a status page, and an API. No per-seat pricing. No "non-commercial" fine print. If you need more, paid plans start at $7/month.

We might not be the right tool if you need multi-region checking (we're working on it), full observability, or enterprise compliance. But if you need reliable uptime monitoring without the bloat, give us a try.

Simple monitoring done right

25 free monitors. 3-minute checks. No complexity.

Start free