Website monitoring is essential to ensure your web addresses stay functional at all times. Outages, if any, should be reported swiftly so that they can be tackled before bounce rates increase. Here’s where a robust tool like Uptime comes in handy.

Launched in 2013, Uptime.com caters to some big names, like Apple, Microsoft, and PwC. With 44.7M monitoring checks, 115K alerts, and 2,500+ status pages, Uptime has saved billions of dollars for companies around the world – all the while maintaining a 99.999% uptime.

Uptime offers 30 different check types, from basic HTTPS checks and advanced Real User Monitoring (RUM) to API endpoint and transaction checks. Hang around until the end as we explore one of the best website monitoring software in more detail, discussing its best features, pricing, and interface, and also listing down a couple of alternatives.

Uptime.com: Plans and pricing

Uptime offers four plans, meaning it caters to businesses of all sizes and needs. It all begins with the Starter plan priced at $20/month, which allows you to run 30 basic checks, 1 transaction, API, and page speed check each, along with 10 cloud status checks and 2 group checks.

The check frequency here is 5 minutes, and you get 4 check locations and 3 locations per check. You can also create 1 status page – private or public. This plan allows access to 50K RUM data points per month and data retention for up to 13 months. We found this plan offering good value for the money, making it ideal for startups with one site to manage.

Next comes the Essential plan at $67/month, where you get 50 basic checks, 5 transaction checks, and 10 API checks. The group check limit also increases to 10, and the check frequency drops to 3 minutes. The best part is that you can run checks for every location around the globe as well as enjoy 5 locations per check. The number of RUM data points also increases to 200K on this plan.

Unlike the Starter plan, you can customize the design of your status page here and also create password-protected status pages. The Essential plan is an extended version of the Starter one, ideal for small businesses.

If you’re a large business, you can switch to the Premium plan at $285/month, which pretty much has everything Uptime has to offer. This includes 200 basic checks, 15 transaction checks, and 20 API checks.

These checks can be run at an interval as low as 1 minute. You get 15 locations per check and the mighty ability to select private locations. More good news: SMS and phone alerts, both of which are capped in the previous two plans.

If even this subscription doesn’t fit your needs, you can build a plan from scratch with customizable configurations and billing.

Another good thing about Uptime is that it offers a 14-day free trial for all its paid plans – no credit card needed. So, you can take the service out for a spin before committing to a plan.

Uptime.com: Features

Uptime offers 3 free tools: domain health check, website page speed test, and global uptime test. The domain health test helps you check parameters like web and DNS performance, functionality, blacklist monitoring, and so on.

Speed tests help you determine loading speeds of your web page from various global locations, while the global uptime test checks a website’s responsiveness and provides insights into performance disparities.

Besides this, Uptime offers more than 30 check types. Basic checks such as HTTPS, Whois/Domain checks, TCP Port checks, and malware checks are available with every plan. Several advanced checks, such as API monitoring, transaction checks, group checks, and cloud checks, are also available.

For instance, the platform allows checking various APIs, such as REST APIs, gRPC APIs, and GraphQL APIs, to ensure they are working fine and alert the concerned team immediately in case there’s an issue.

Needless to say, you can also run Real User Monitoring (RUM), under which data from real users are analyzed to identify issues like 4xx and 5xx HTTP status codes and JavaScript issues, page load times, AJAX load times, and bounce rates.

This data-driven approach helps you fix minor issues before they become major business concerns. You can also access detailed RUM reports to drill down on user data.

Uptime also offers impressive no-code transaction checks that help you check specific website elements such as clicking a button, visiting a website, or entering information in a text field. You can even mimic entire user paths, such as adding items to a shopping cart or contact form submissions.

The platform’s synthetic transaction monitoring also supports advanced web applications such as MFA sites. For example, using Uptime, businesses can check whether 2FA on their site is functioning for all users.

Another feature we loved about Uptime was the Status pages, a powerful reporting and accountability tool that helps communicate outages and manage incidents more efficiently. Uptime offers 3 types of status pages: public, private, and SLA pages, each customizable with HTML and CSS.

Uptime.com: Interface and in use

The Uptime interface is clean and intuitive. You’ll see a panel on the left with all function options. Whenever you’re setting up a new check, you’ll see a window pop up with four options: Basic, Advanced, Escalations, and Maintenance.

For instance, if you want to run a basic HTTPS check, you’ll find it in the Basic tab. Similarly, advanced checks like RUM and transaction checks can be found in the Advanced tab.

Each check can be configured within seconds by simply filling out the required fields such as check type, contacts who’ll receive the notifications, locations to run the check from, and of course, the URL to be checked.

The Escalations tab makes it very easy to manage incidents by sending alerts to concerned team members. You can set up a hierarchy of escalations based on incident sensitivity.

You’ll see all the checks on the Uptime’s main dashboard along with a summary of all your checks. At just a glance, you can check variables like total checks, outages, response times, global uptime, and RUM load time. What we like the most is that the dashboard is fully customizable. So, you can start with a clean slate and only add data you want to see on the dashboard.

Overall, Uptime is easy to use and get the hang of. There are a lot of tutorials on the website with detailed step-by-step guides that help you set up and use the account. Sure, Uptime, like most website monitoring tools, does require a bit of getting used to. However, the learning curve isn’t steep, thanks to its huge knowledge base.

Uptime.com: Support

Uptime offers comprehensive support for both existing and potential customers. You can either fill out a contact form on the website, call them directly, or send them an email.

While direct contact with a support agent might be your only and last port of call, you can also check out the extensive library of free resources that’s more than capable of answering any questions you might have. There are detailed blogs, release notes, and API documentations, as well as a quick start guide – a lot of material to help you get the hang of the platform.

Last but not least, you’ll also get premium and priority support if you’re on the Premium plan.

Uptime.com: The competition

Uptime is undoubtedly a great website monitoring option for businesses. However, if for some reason it doesn’t suit your needs, you can consider UptimeRobot.

For starters, UptimeRobot offers a completely free plan with 50 monitors and 5 minutes of monitoring interval. You can run various checks such as HTTP, port & ping monitor, as well as benefit from a handy keyword monitor. UptimeRobot is also much cheaper than Uptime.com.

Even its most expensive plan costs just $54/month (for 200 monitors and 30-second intervals). However, UptimeRobot lacks Real User Monitoring, which is where Uptime.com really shines through.

Uptime.com: Final verdict

Uptime is a comprehensive website monitoring tool that lets you run more than 30 types of checks – both basic and advanced checks. You can evaluate the API status on your pages, micro and extended transaction checks, page speed tests, and real user monitoring statuses.

We liked the immediate response and alert mechanisms as well as the detailed escalation hierarchy that helps resolve issues at the earliest. You can get started with 3 free tools for domain health and speed checks and then upgrade to paid plans starting at $20/month.

The interface is pretty clean, and there’s a lot of knowledge material on the website to help you scale the slight learning curve. Plus, the support is robust with call, email, and contact form support.

Overall, Uptime delivers excellent value for money and is a good option for both small and large businesses.

FAQs

We list the best website defacement monitoring service.

Businesses today need to have a constant online presence, which is why website monitoring has become indispensable. As the name suggests, a website monitor keeps an eye on your web addresses and immediately notifies you if there’s any downtime.

Businesses may lose an average of $137-$437 for every minute their website is down. This is where website monitoring tools like Pingdom come in handy. Pingdom runs various uptime and speed checks for your websites and produces data-driven reports so that you can know which parts of your website need attention. You also get stats from real user experience, which helps you identify visitor attributes and overall trends.

Stick around until the end as we’ll explore Pingdom in more detail. We’ll discuss its best features, pricing plans, and in-use experience, besides suggesting a couple of alternatives.

Pingdom: Plans and pricing

Pingdom has kept its pricing pretty simple. There are just two feature-wise plans – Synthetic Monitoring and Real User monitoring. The Synthetic Monitoring plan starts at just $10/month for 10 uptime monitors, 1 advanced monitor (page speed or transaction checks), and 50 SMS alerts.

However, there are as many as 22 options to choose from within this plan with various numbers of monitors, going all the way up to 30,000 uptime monitors. This makes it ideal for businesses of all sizes, from small businesses to multinational mega businesses.

Besides uptime monitoring, this plan offers page speed monitoring, public status pages, alerts, and transaction monitoring. Regardless of the threshold limit you choose, you can add unlimited users, making it good for small teams.

Next is the Real User Monitoring plan starting at $10/month for 100,000 page views. Here too, you have 22 threshold limits to choose from, all the way up to 1 billion pageviews. We love that there’s no limit on the number of sites you can run RUM on and users you can add.

Now, you can choose both these plans simultaneously in any permutation and combination as per your needs, giving you a lot of flexibility. Pingdom also offers a 30-day free trial to test out the platform before committing to a plan.

Pingdom: Features

Uptime monitoring is one of Pingdom’s core features. It keeps an eye on your websites and sends you instant notifications in case of outages. You can choose the mode as well as the frequency of the alerts. For example, critical alerts might require instant notifications, whereas minor issues may be notified an hour later.

Pingdom goes a step ahead and runs a detailed root cause analysis to find out what exactly went wrong. For every incident, administrators can run a traceroute, identify the output from a web server, and analyze response codes from servers. This helps in quick incident resolution.

Pingdom’s page speed checks are also different from other monitoring solutions. In addition to checking the page load times, Pingdom also examines how various elements like HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images are performing in relation to each other.

It also lets you zero in on the exact element that is slowing down your website. Pingdom’s comprehensive visualizations let you see how changes made on a page affect its speed. The platform assigns performance grades to each test so that you can know at just a glance how your pages have been performing.

Pingdom also comes with a simple transaction web recorder that lets you record a transaction for a check instead of having to code it manually. This makes it easy for non-IT teams to quickly monitor various parts of the customer journey on the website. For instance, you can run tests for simple actions like clicking a button, filling out a form, new user registrations, user login, or even completing payment on the website.

Besides all these synthetic monitoring features, Pingdom also offers a pretty comprehensive Real User Monitoring (RUM) function. RUM monitoring offers detailed insights into how real users access and interact with your website.

This helps you find out where customers spend most of their time on your website with the help of metrics like bounce rates, top browsers, active sessions, and top-visited pages.

Pingdom: Interface and in use

Pingdom’s interface is pretty data-driven, laced with various charts and graphs that help you understand your website performance metrics better. For instance, the top-level dashboards give you a quick summary of how different websites are performing.

To dig deeper, you can switch to the page-level metrics that focus on specific pages like checkout pages, signup pages, or your blog. Plus, every test and report on Pingdom is color-coded so that you can quickly identify any problems.

For instance, if you’re using RUM, you’ll see a live global map with areas marked in different colors, indicating load times in those regions. What's more, there are detailed timelines with vertical bar graphs for each check you run.

Getting started with the platform isn’t complex at all. You can add a new check in a matter of minutes, for instance. Moreover, there are a lot of help videos on the platform that guide you through the entire setup process.

Pingdom: Support

Pingdom has a dedicated customer portal for technical support, customer service, or product assistance. Here, you can raise a support ticket for any queries you might have. You can even set a priority for the issue you’re facing to get a quicker response.

Plus, you can even reach out to them on call between 8 am and 5 pm Central Time. They have dedicated phone numbers for the US, the UK, and SE regions.

Besides this, there are a lot of resource videos and help articles on the website that solve almost all beginner-level queries you might have.

Pingdom: The competition

HostTracker is a more affordable solution, allowing you to run 25+ URL uptime checks at just $18/month. Plus, you can add additional website checks for just $0.50/month. HostTracker also checks the IP DNS blacklist checker and Google's unsafe websites list to check if any of your websites have been blacklisted for any reason.

Plus, you can run comprehensive database checks along with transaction and speed checks. However, it lacks Real User Monitoring and status pages.

Uptime.com is another website monitoring tool very similar to Pingdom with features like cloud status checks and group checks. It also offers more than 20 types of basic checks, such as SMTP, NTP, UDP, and POP – something you don’t get with most other platforms.

You can run checks from unlimited global locations with as many as 15 locations per check and private location checks. However, Uptime.com is more expensive than Pingdom.

Pingdom: Final verdict

Pingdom is one of the most complete website monitoring tools you’ll ever come across, offering everything you need. It checks for website uptime with detailed root cause analysis and also has a robust speed check feature. Its Real User Monitoring capabilities help you drill down on real-user metrics with parameters like Apdex score, time to first byte, load time, and bounce rates.

The best thing about Pingdom is its visually graphic dashboards. You’ll find a lot of color-coded charts, maps, and graphs, which makes it easy to identify any bottlenecks. Regardless of the plan you choose, you can invite unlimited users to share these detailed and customizable reports with.

Pingdom also gives you a lot of plan options to choose from – 22 tiers each for synthetic and RUM monitoring. This makes it ideal for both small and large businesses. Last but not least, you get a 30-day free trial to try out before committing.

FAQs

Website monitoring is an essential part of the suite of business tools these days. After all, you cannot afford for your website to be down for even just a few minutes. Besides financial loss, it can hurt your brand’s reputation and market image.

Datadog offers top-notch website monitoring software that comes included with Real Time Monitoring (RUM), which is monitoring based on real user interactions. You also get robust synthetic monitoring, which allows you to test every component of your website. Business giants like Netflix, Adobe, Airbnb, and Spotify trust Datadog to manage their infrastructure.

If you want to know more about this all-around website monitor, stick around until the end. In this article, we’ll discuss Datadog's features, pricing, and interface, and also give you a couple of alternatives to consider.

Datadog: Plans and pricing

Datadog has separate plans for synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring, much like Pingdom. However, Datadog goes a step ahead and breaks these plans down further – it offers dedicated plans for API testing, browser testing, and mobile app tests.

The API testing plan costs $5/month for 10K test runs. The Browser Testing plan costs $12/month per 1,000 test runs, and the Mobile App Testing plan costs $50/month per 100 test runs.

There are two plans for RUM too, one with session replay and one without it. The RUM with Session Replay plan costs $1.80/month for 1,000 sessions, while the RUM plan (without replay) costs $1.50/month for 1,000 sessions.

These limits are enough for any small to midsized business, making Datadog an affordable solution. Except for the mobile app testing plan, you’ll only have to pay $18.80/month for RUM and synthetic monitoring. This is cheaper than the likes of Uptime.com, whose plans can cost as high as $67 to $285 per month.

Apart from website monitoring solutions, Datadog also offers a complete security suite with solutions like cloud and application security management, runtime code analysis, CI pipeline visibility, and network monitoring – each function has a separate plan.

Datadog: Features

Datadog’s Real User Monitoring is one of the best across the board. It churns out essential website performance data such as Core Web Vitals and load times by harnessing data from real user experiences.

The best thing about Datadog is that you can view session replays to pinpoint the exact cause and instance of the issue. This lets you collect and process every error, resource, and action during each session. Users' actions can vary from checkout button clicks, taps, and more. You can even track custom metrics that are critical to your performance.

Datadog also offers comprehensive Mobile Real User Monitoring (Mobile RUM) functions that test your app's stability, identify and address app crashes, and assist in resolving any glitches.

Its no-code web recorder makes it pretty easy to build customizable assertions that work on all the latest devices and operating systems. Datadog is also smart enough to avoid any UI changes so that you do not get any false positives.

Datadog’s API tests are ridiculously easy to create. You can access its API Catalog to access your overall HTTP test coverage and then build API checks for any untested endpoints in just a few clicks. Datadog’s AI-generated Synthetics swiftly identify any business-critical flows so that you can create the right test in a matter of seconds.

However, Datadog doesn’t stop at just detecting errors; it also helps in quick resolution by grouping related errors automatically so that you’re not bombarded with error notifications. You can run a simple faceted search to find out more about how these errors started and evolved.

Datadog also has one of the most extensive collections of third-party integrations, allowing you to set up custom workflows with as many as 800+ applications. Apps for various categories such as alerting, automation, caching, incident management, and log collection are available.

Datadog: Interface and in use

Datadog’s dashboards are filled with interactive charts and graphs that give you a quick snapshot of all running website checks. This graphic-oriented approach makes it easy for administrators to spot and resolve any errors.

Adding a new monitor is pretty straightforward. You simply need to select the request type, name it, add the URL, select locations you want to track from, and define alerting conditions.

When you create a synthetics test, Datadog collects data and generates dashboards about your stack, browser applications, overall test performance, private locations, and events. There are similar dashboards for API checks and browser checks, too.

If you’re running RUM, you’ll see a performance summary tab with immediate summaries of each app's vitals, error deployments, and user analytics.

However, given the number of functions and dashboards Datadog offers, you’ll need a bit of time to get the hang of the platform. There are tons of videos on the platform that guide you through the setup and day-to-day use of the platform.

Datadog: Support

Datadog offers decent support with all its paid plans. Chat support is available from 10 am EST to 7 pm EST on weekdays, while email support is available during business hours (8:00 PM Sunday - 9:00 PM Friday EST, excluding holidays). You can expect a reply within 2 hours for business-critical issues and 48 hours for general issues.

While this is good enough customer support, Datadog does offer something better. If yours is a large organization that needs 24/7 technical support, you can purchase Datadog's Premier support plan, which costs 8% of monthly spend ($2,000 minimum). However, you need to make a minimum of a one-year commitment for this plan.

Under this, you get 24/7 email, chat, and phone support, with response times as low as 30 minutes. Besides this, there’s a designated team of global support engineers as well as priority handling for escalations. Simply put, this will be just like having an in-house IT team dedicated to Datadog issues.

Datadog: The competition

Pingdom is a robust monitoring solution offering as many as 44 plans across synthetic and real user monitoring with different check thresholds. This makes it as ideal for small businesses that need to run just 10 uptime tests in a month as it is for large businesses that want to run, say, 30,000+ checks.

Much like Datadog, Pingdom also offers customizable graphical dashboards. Its top-level dashboards provide a quick summary of all website performance and page-level metrics to help drill this information deeper.

If you’re looking for something more affordable and value-packed, Host-Tracker can be a good option. Its plans start from just $9.9/month, allowing 10 website checks. You can add additional websites at just $0.70/site. In addition to synthetic monitoring, Host-Tracker also checks the IP DNS blacklist and Google’s unsafe websites list to ensure your websites aren’t blacklisted. However, it doesn’t offer RUM.

Datadog: Final verdict

Datadog is a one-stop solution for all your website monitoring and security needs. You get both real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring, like API tests, browser tests, and mobile app testing.

Each function is offered as a separate plan so that you have to pay only for the features you use. This is ideal for small businesses with limited needs. Datadog’s extensive information-driven dashboards make it a very intuitive platform. These dashboards are fully customizable, allowing you to drill data down as per your needs.

Plus, Datadog is one of the few monitoring solutions that offer a dedicated plan for premium support, with 24/7 call, email, and chat support. That said, such extensive features also come with a bit of a learning curve. However, there are a lot of resources and videos on the platform to help beginners out.

FAQs

We've also listed the best website defacement monitoring service.

HP offers a staggeringly large array of business laptops, with the 800 series sitting in the mid-range. If you want lower prices, choose the 600 series; for the lightest designs, head to the 1040 or Dragonfly series. Even within the 800 series there’s a huge choice, so if you prefer a 2-in-1 design or AMD chips there will be something for you.

The 840 G9 is based on Intel’s 12th generation Core chips, in this case the i7-1255U. With only two performance cores, it’s no match for the i7-1260P in tasks that exploit multiple threads, but it will blast through everyday jobs with ease. Its low power demands also helped the 840 G9 last for between nine and 14 hours in our battery tests, and if the 256GB SSD isn’t big enough, you can open up the chassis and add a second (but physically smaller) M.2 SSD.

At 1.5kg it isn’t the most portable machine around, but it’s sleek and – for a business laptop – stylish. There’s no Ethernet port, but an HDMI port accompanies two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left-hand side. USB-A ports sit on either side, and while our review unit doesn’t include a nano-SIM slot it is available on variants.

There’s no shortage of security features. On the left you’ll find a smart card reader, with a fingerprint reader tucked under the cursor keys plus a Windows Hello-compatible webcam. HP makes much of the 840 G9’s conferencing abilities, and its 1440p webcam is certainly above average. We weren’t blown away by its Auto Frame capabilities – this works but is stutter-y – but we do love the clear audio picked up by the dual-array mics. These cancel out background noise, too.

HP integrates its Wolf Security package within the laptop, but there’s only a single year’s subscription as standard. If you buy direct from HP, you can triple this – and upgrade the single year of return-to-base warranty to three years of on-site cover – for £179. Be careful, though, as you may end up with a Sure View screen (see our Dragonfly review for its pluses and minuses) rather than the excellent panel in our test unit.

We were similarly impressed by the quality of the keyboard, which combines the excellent traits of quietness with a cushioned yet decisive action. It would be a pleasure to belt out a report on this machine. You can even play music in the background, with one of the better pairs of speakers in evidence here.

This is a well-built laptop that may have taken our Labs Winner award if it wasn’t for the limited warranty and the question marks over which screen comes with which model.

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