Montastic is not so right? ...

I had a feeling I wrote my last post too early. Although Montastic is not bad, its not particuarly good either.

On the site it says:
How often does the system monitor my sites?
We try to do it every 10 minutes at the minimum. This varies depending on the system load.

However I've found there to be at least 30 minute delays in the change of thats from what I've seen. Thats getting up to delays that make the service pretty useless for my purposes. I want to feel secure that if my site goes down, I'm going to know about it within 10 minutes at the most.

Anyway, I can't complain about a free service. It does seem like I'm going to have to pay to get a decent service. $50 a month still seems too much though. $10 - $15 I'd probably be willing to do. Although often it is worth shelling out the bucks for peace of mind.

Montastic is right!

I was using HostTracker to monitor the websites I look after, and it worked pretty well. I liked the touch of having a GTalk client able to message me if a site when down. Coupled with the fact that any offline GTalk conversations went to my gmail and therefore my phone, it was a good setup. They had upgraded their interface recently which I found more time-consuming to use.

However my trial period expired, and I found that the pricing for what I needed it for seemed ridiculous. $54.99 a month to basically ping test 25 servers? It seemed to me the cost for them to do it for me should be a lot cheaper. Its certainly a service I would pay some amount of money for, but not that much.

After searching around a while for alternatives, I came across Montastic. I've only just signed up, but its looking good. It doesn't have all the features of something like HostTracker, but its quick and easy and should do what I'm looking for. They seemed to have the same mentality as me. To quote their site:

Why is it free? Is there a catch?

There is no catch. We developed Montastic for us and the cost of development was minimal. Montastic is 100% automated and adding servers to monitors costs virtually nothing. So, we wanted to share its usefulness and its fun with others.