Pingdom Free Accounts Work With iPhone Application

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Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service that can notify you via email or SMS when your web server, mail server, or another services goes offline. The service offers reports that are useful for tracking availability, response time, and errors for your servers over time. I have recommended the Pingdom service in the past. See Review of the Pingdom uptime monitoring service The basic package is $10 a month and comes with five service checks, 20 SMS alerts, and unlimited email alerts. The business package is $40 a month and comes with 30 service checks, 200 SMS alerts, discounts on additional SMS alerts, and unlimited email alerts. Additional checks are $6 a year each and additional SMS messages are available for $0.45/basic and $0.20/business.

Yesterday, Pingdom announced that it would begin to offer a free account that comes with one service check and 20 SMS messages. Additional SMS messages are available for $0.45 each, although additional checks are not. Currently, the free account has all the same features as the paid account including checks down to one-minute resolution. The only constrain is that you must log into your free account every ninety days to keep it active. There are many uptime monitoring services that have free accounts for a single service, but I have been a Pingdom customer for over a year now and have been very happy with the service and regularly recommend it. The pricing of the service is geared towards business users and I suspect many individuals will be happy with the free account.

The Pingdom released a free iPhone application in January. I tested the iPhone application with a free account and it worked the same as a paid account. The Pingdom mobile application is currently very basic, but can be useful if you want to quickly look at the status of your services and the uptime and response time for each service for the last 30 days. The application will also show you information about each check. It is not possible to see longer-term trends, details on errors, or to make any changes on your services. Hopefully, Pingdom will add features to the mobile application in future releases. If the service took advantage of Apple’s push notification for iPhones it could remove the need to SMS alerts for users with iPhones.