Hyperping is a beautiful, simple, and reliable uptime monitoring service for your website(s) so you can know within seconds when your site goes down. It has several tools to help you diagnose connection issues from eight different regions around the world, and can integrate with Slack, SMS, and more.
Monitoring Your Website as a Business Owner
You've just launched your website, congrats! You started reaching out to friends and family, inviting people to visit your page to learn about your product/service and potentially become customers.
A week later you bump into your brother at a coffee shop and he casually mentions your site has been down for three days, something about a 500 Internal Server Error. You panic and think about all the missed leads that just slipped through the cracks.
As a business owner, you have several options for staying informed on your website's status:
- Pray to the Web Hosting Gods that your hosting provider monitors uptime and emails you about it (this is very rare)
- Wait for your friends to tell you (this is the most common way of finding out a website is down)
- Purchase an expensive service such as Statuspage by Atlassian
- Try Hyperping for 15 days free (without a credit card!) and purchase the cheap monthly or yearly license
Options 1 and 2 are out of the question. Statuspage is a great solution and is preferred by large companies such as Reddit, Epic Games, and universities across the United States, but it will cost you quite a bit of cash to use their service.
Hyperping is an amazing alternative that won't hurt the bank, but provides just as good a service as Statuspage. It constantly pings your website from eight regions around the world, and will let you know how many regions are affected by outages.
When your site goes down, Hyperping notifies you immediately via your preferred contact method. Without Hyperping, you'd be stuck waiting for someone, probably a client, to notice your site has gone down, and that's not good for business. With Hyperping, you'll be the first to know, and you can fix the issue before anyone notices.
It even covers false positives, or outages specific to a region. From the creator himself:
Hyperping is using Amazon Web Services' Lambda + API Gateway to ping your urls. Once a downtime is detected your url is pinged from every other location to confirm the outage. There is no place for false positives.
This is what the current list of locations looks like:
Monitoring Your Clients' Websites as a Developer
All web devs have been in the same situation before: you're minding your own business on a Wednesday afternoon, and your phones buzzes. It's an email from your biggest client, fuming about how the website's been down for hours, and they're losing customers fast. You start to panic!
The questions running through your mind:
- When did this happen?
- How long has this been happening?
- How did this happen?
Hyperping won't answer the third question, but it will help you get there much faster. One of the key pieces of information to know when tracking down an issue is the time and duration of the issue. With this knowledge, you can pinpoint what caused the website to go down.
With Hyperping, you would've been informed of the issue immediately. And I mean, within seconds. I tried out Hyperping using their free trial and rebooted our site as a test. Within 30 seconds, I got a message from Hyperping saying the site went down. Another minute later, I received a message saying the site was back up, after a total of two minutes of downtime.
These timely updates are crucial to me as a web dev who needs to know immediately when my clients' websites are having issues. If people can't load their sites, they're not getting customers. All the work I've put into creating the website, working on SEO, and making it look nice has gone to waste if customers open their site to a 404.
My Thoughts and Experience with Hyperping
The best part about Hyperping is its integrations. You can easily integrate with SMS, email, Slack, Telegram, and anything that accepts a webhook. Our team uses Slack, so I followed the instructions to set up a Slack integration with Hyperping. Here's an example of the API response:
You can also use Hyperping to monitor a specific page on your website, not just the base URL. You can use it with any URL that accepts HEAD HTTP requests. I have a website that has a static landing page using WordPress on the base domain, and a subdomain that has a React web application installed. Since the two could go down individually, it's good to monitor both separately.
Closing Thoughts
One of the downsides to buying into a small uptime monitoring service is the risk of the service being discontinued, as others have. You can track the developer's activity here but there's ultimately no guarantee it will continue to be supported a year from today. As your website scales, it may be worth your money to invest in a larger service like Statuspage, but in the meantime Hyperping fills the gap as a more affordable uptime monitoring service. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
If you find another great uptime monitoring service, let me know in the comments, or shoot me an email at bryan@aloa.co!
