There are probably hundreds of sites for monitoring website uptime and alerting you when your site(s) go down. I’ve tried tons of them, but StatusCake really stands away from the pack in many ways. Their free tier is so generous that I sometimes wonder how they stay in business. Where others typically give you one or two free checks every day, StatusCake gives you unlimited number of sites, with tests every 5 minutes from a random location for free. If you want tests every minute, or advanced features like SMS notification, set locations, and SSL monitoring, you pay a fair monthly rate.
The free SKU includes some basic dashboard functionality, like global uptime, response times, and performance charts. At a glance, I can see how our customers fared for the day, week, or month. A weekly report is emailed to me with stats for the week.
Another feature that really shines is the public site option. This lets you choose tests to display on a public-facing dashboard. We don’t use it, because we don’t want to leak our customers’ information. But for companies wanting to be transparent about their online performance, this is a quick, easy way to do a public ‘uptime’ reporting dashboard.
Their API makes other integrations possible with a little elbow grease. I mention StatusCake briefly in my book Enter, Trello Dojo, showing readers how to roll it into a nice “big screen” dashboard (GitHub Gist here). This is a nice way to show online health to the rest of your organization, along with information from Trello and Weather Underground.
In all, one of those rare services that really stand out among peers. Check them out!
