Uptime Robot
uptimerobot.com
uptimerobot.com
[1] http://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/comodo/positivessl...
You just have to be able to receive email to webmaster@yourdomain.tld for that to work.
GoDaddy is the cheapest, but I hate them. Use Namecheap.
> Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only. Subscribers MUST upgrade to Class 2 or higher level for any domain and site of commercial nature
Class 1 is "StartSSL Free", and Class 2 is "StartSSL Verified" which costs $59.90.
But even when you want to let people connect without SNI, there is no reason to skimp on security. How about sending people with bad browsers to a different port per site?
You can't do that for the very reason SNI exists. All you've got is the beginning of an SSL handshake on your single IP; you don't know what host they want yet, so you neither know what port to redirect to nor what certificate to serve.
And even if they bookmark the https, it keeps working.
And if they have something like 'https everywhere', then they're not using an obsolete version of IE.
The only failure point is if they click an https link by a third party.
Which protocol the form is submitted via is only half the security issue. The form itself needs to be served over https also to avoid a MITM attack on the destination of the form submission.
But yes, clicking an https link directly would cause issues.
It's bad practice to not use a secure login, because anyone who is sniffing HTTP traffic can see your Uptime Robot username and password in plaintext.
This might not be that bad for this website, but keep in mind how many people use the same email/password for other services, or their email.
you should be using a password manager and have unique for every service.
Otherwise I set up two monitors, look interesting, useful, and well done! Good job!
Anyway, we ended up using StatusCake[1] instead, if anyone is looking for an alternative with more features and less restrictions.
http://cl.ly/image/1Y1U3b0z2U0U
http://cl.ly/image/3c0e38312a2W
edit: If it is of any use for debugging, these sites' IDs are: 775909552 (up) and 775909549 (down).
http://cl.ly/image/2L1V1A2K180f
Liking the service a lot by the way! That's why I am reporting what I find.
So every time I see a post, ad or anything about server monitoring systems, it makes me smile. It's one of those projects that everyone has: "One of these days, I'll work on it."
The off the shelf services will only get you so far, even with keyword search. Sometimes you just have to roll your own.
With a complex ecommerce build you can run into situations where something has gone badly wrong with the pricing, e.g. everything is marked up as on sale, price £0.00. With a roll your own solution you can build an XML tree of the document, go through your HTML tags and put in some rules to make sure that all the prices are greater than zero (for instance).
As for keywords, you want something on the page in the footer, however, that can change. Eventually I ended up using the content between the <noscript> tags as that really did not change (even though they were at the top of the page).
Sending out an SMS is not hard to do, however, now that people have email on the phone it is not really that useful plus your credits can run out.
A 'roll your own' solution with advanced content checks can be used with a standard 'Uptime Robot' type of service. Clients can have the 'Uptime Robot' and manage it themselves, they will get great peace of mind. Meanwhile, the homebrew check can give a developer a heads up on things going wrong before they go wrong (as far as the client is concerned) and pick up on more subtle failings that a client really doesn't need to be told about at odd hours of the night.
Depending on your traffic levels you may also want to remember to take the IP address of your check program out of your stats.
If anyone does want a very simple PHP script to iterate over a list of URL's (and their respective search strings), do the CURL thing and some DOM parsing, with SMS mailout of whatever the 50x fail is then I can find you one.
Uptime Robot also has an API like Pingdom, but with the added benefit you can monitor up to 50 websites for free. The API allows me to almost never log in to the control panel, as I watch the status using my custom monitoring panels.
(fwiw, we're moving off of pingdom too).
Also, I find it odd that the interface is > 1280px wide(at least it is for me presently). I'm not used to a horizontal scroll on a 13" MBP.
Overall, if it turns up less false positives than Pingdom, I'll be happy.
Other than minor things it's working well so far.
No idea if it still works, assume it does!
I think it's also prone to misconfiguration, since you have to explicitly check a box to alert when back up.
It just feels like a second class citizen.
re: using the API, we'd rather it did so also, but for the longest time Pingdom only sent out e-mail and didn't have any sort of webhook. They apparently have webhook support in their new Beep Manager offering, but that's still in beta.
re: misconfiguration, which check box are you referring to? The only two there are for ack timeouts and auto resolution.
One thing this is missing is being able to look for a string on a page. (either checking it is there (like "Loaded"/"Latest Posts"...something to indicate all is working fine), or checking it isn't there (like "error", "database connection error" etc)
It has been on the back burner for a bit now because I wasn't able to get traction/vistors onto the site...I guess maybe I should figure out what I was doing wrong.
It can do keyword checking as well as standard ping + port connect.
That's about all it does, which is fine by me.
It's free and it works.
FYI: I'd be willing to pay for SMS alerts (should be "straight forward" with Twilio) or might just work by linking the custom RSS feed to IFTTT...
Just click 'Add Alert Contact'. Also seems pretty granular about which monitors report to what contact.
I get this in the console:
Uncaught TypeError: Object #<error> has no method 'call' jquery.validate.min.js:2
Still have not received any e-mails.
Your success will depend on the quality and efficacy of your marketing.
So I mothballed it for a couple months and then got an unsolicited offer from a guy in Israel to buy the domain for $1,000. Easiest $990 I ever made.
I built https://servercheck.in/ for that reason, and because I wanted cheap 'real' SMS notifications (from a consistent phone number) so I could set a special ringtone on my phone when one of my servers goes down.