If you’re like me and dove head-first into self hosting everything you could think of, there’s a good chance you ran into the same problem I did: How can I self-host an application to let me know if my self hosted applications go down??
There are some great self hosted monitoring apps (upTimeKuma), but if it’s on the server that goes down, well, it ain’t gonna do you much good. You could host it on a seperate server, or rent a tiny cloud instance for it, but the former isn’t going to help you if you’re house loses all power and the later costs money!
All I really need is a service to ping something that’s publicly exposed on my Home Server and let me know if it’s not up. Initially I found https://updown.io, which works great! They give you enough credits to last you 2 years if you set it to check every 15 minutes (which is plenty often enough for me). Well, now it’s been 2 years and I’m out of updown credits. The service isn’t very expensive, but again, I am CHEAP!
Then I came across https://www.uptimedoctor.com which lets you check 5 websites for free (up to every 5 minutes) and will send you an email if any of them are down. The email has some advertising for their services in it, but I’m more than willing to accept that trade-off for the price of free.
I set it up pointing to my public services page and boom! It’s good to go. Easy as that.
Uptimedoctor is perfect for my purposes, but I’m curious if anyone has another interesting solution to the self hosted monitoring problem?