Self-Hosted Uptime Monitoring: The Honest Pingdom Alternative

Self-Hosted Uptime Monitoring: The Honest Pingdom Alternative

I have five things at home I want to know are up: a personal site, a side-project SaaS that earns coffee money, a status page for a Discord community, a self-hosted photo gallery, and a WordPress site for my dad's small business. Pingdom wants $15/month for that. SolarWinds wants $20. Datadog Synthetics wants real money plus an SE on a call.

That's not a real fit. That's enterprise software cosplaying as consumer software.

What I actually want is: ping these URLs every minute, push to my phone if one's down, optionally tell me why — and ideally also tell me when the box those things run on is about to fall over. That's it.

There are four reasonable answers to that. Three of them are free, one of them isn't. None of them is "the winner" for every case. Here's what each one actually does.

The contenders

| Tool | Type | Free tier | Where it shines | Where it doesn't | |---|---|---|---|---| | Uptime Kuma | Self-hosted | Unlimited | Pure uptime, gorgeous UI | Zero machine-level metrics | | StatusCake free | SaaS | 10 tests, 5-min interval | Easy, has SSL/domain checks | Free tier is barely-there | | HetrixTools free | SaaS | 15 uptime + 1 server | Generous free tier, blacklist monitoring | UI looks like 2014, complicated | | Netwarden free | SaaS (self-host coming) | 1 host | Uptime + machine + WordPress in one place | Free tier is 1 host only |

That's the headline. Now the real version.

Uptime Kuma: the gold standard for just uptime

Uptime Kuma is a single Docker container, written by one guy (Louis Lam), and it is genuinely excellent. It's the thing you should default to if all you need is "ping these URLs and yell at me when they're down."

docker run -d --restart=always -p 3001:3001 \
  -v uptime-kuma:/app/data \
  --name uptime-kuma louislam/uptime-kuma:1

That's the install. You're done. Open :3001, click around, add monitors.

What it does well:

• Unlimited monitors. It's your container. Add 5, add 500.
• Every check type that matters: HTTP(s), TCP, ping, DNS, SSL expiry, keyword matching, JSON keyword, push monitors (heartbeat-style), Steam servers, and a dozen more.
• Notification fan-out to email, webhooks, Gotify, ntfy, Apprise, and ~90 other channels.
• Public status pages that don't look embarrassing.
• Active community. Updates ship regularly.

What it doesn't do, and won't:

• No machine-level metrics. It pings your endpoints. It does not know your CPU, your disk, your memory, your VMs, your databases. Kuma is uptime-only by design.
• No agent. If your Pi is fine but your Plex container died and is hanging on the port, the HTTP check might still respond and Kuma will tell you everything is great.
• You run it yourself. That's a feature for some, a chore for others. If your Kuma instance dies, nobody alerts you that your alerting died.

Use Uptime Kuma if uptime is all you need, you're comfortable running a Docker container, and you want zero ongoing cost.

StatusCake free: easy, but the free tier is a brochure

StatusCake is a real SaaS with a real free tier. The free tier gets you:

• 10 tests
• 5-minute check interval (paid plans go to 1 minute or 30 seconds)
• Email alerts (no push, no SMS on free)
• Public status page (1 of them)
• SSL and domain expiry monitoring

The good: their UI is clean, the alerts are reliable, and you don't have to host anything. SSL expiry monitoring is genuinely useful and not every free competitor has it.

The not-so-good: 5-minute intervals mean you can be down for nearly five minutes before they notice. For 1-5 small sites this is probably fine. For anything where you actually care, you're getting upsold to the paid tier within a month.

Use StatusCake free if you want zero-effort SaaS, you don't want to self-host anything, and 5-minute checks are good enough.

HetrixTools free: the surprisingly generous one

HetrixTools is the wildcard. Their free tier is, frankly, the most generous in this list:

• 15 uptime monitors
• 1-minute check intervals (yes, really, on free)
• 1 server monitor (CPU, RAM, disk, network) via their agent
• Blacklist monitoring (24 monitors for IP/domain blacklist checks)
• 2 contact endpoints

That's a lot of free. The catch is the UI feels like late-2010s Bootstrap and the configuration flow has the personality of a billing system. It works, it just isn't pretty.

The blacklist monitoring is a real selling point if you run mail servers — being on Spamhaus and not knowing about it for three weeks is genuinely bad. Nothing else here does that out of the box.

What's missing:

• Server monitoring is one box on free. Want to monitor 3 servers? Pay.
• No deep app awareness. Their agent does host metrics, not "your WordPress site is slow because the database is groaning." Generic.
• The dashboard is fine. Not great. Fine.

Use HetrixTools free if you have many endpoints to ping and one Linux box to watch, blacklist checking matters to you, and you don't care about UX.

Netwarden: where the wedge actually is

I work on Netwarden, so factor that into how you read the next paragraphs. I'll try to be honest about where it doesn't win.

The free tier is 1 host. That's a real constraint and the most common reason someone bounces. If you need uptime checks against 15 unrelated URLs and nothing else, HetrixTools free is straight-up a better fit.

Where Netwarden's pitch actually works is when "uptime monitoring" and "machine monitoring" stop being two separate problems. Concretely:

• The single Go agent on your box gives you CPU, memory, disk, network, processes, system updates count, container metrics (Docker/Podman), VM metrics (libvirt/KVM/Proxmox), MySQL, Postgres — and uptime/HTTP checks pointed at the same machine, with alerts that combine "host is up but the WordPress site returns 502" into one signal instead of two disconnected ones.
• The WordPress plugin gives you actual application-side telemetry: PHP version, plugin updates pending, slow queries, WP-Cron status. Nothing else in this list does that.
• Mobile push (iOS + Android app, real ones, not "we send an email to your phone") that fires within seconds of a state change.

Where it doesn't win:

• Uptime-only fleet of 15 random URLs: HetrixTools free or Uptime Kuma both beat the 1-host free tier.
• You insist on self-hosting today: Uptime Kuma wins. Netwarden's self-hosted Bun binary is in preview — coming, but not "it's ready, here's a link."
• You want 100+ integrations into every chat tool: Netwarden does email + push + outbound webhook. That's it on purpose. If you need Slack, route through your own webhook endpoint.

The paid tiers are $9.90/month for 5 hosts (Solo) and $29.90/month for 25 hosts (Pro). For someone running a small fleet — say, a Pi, a NAS, a Proxmox node, and a VPS — Solo is the realistic line.

How to pick

Honest framework. Pick the row that matches you:

• "I have 1 box and want everything on it monitored" → Netwarden free, done.
• "I have 15 random URLs and one Linux box" → HetrixTools free.
• "I want self-hosted, uptime only, never want to pay anyone" → Uptime Kuma.
• "I want SaaS, hate self-hosting, ok with 5-min checks" → StatusCake free.
• "I have 3-5 boxes and want host metrics + uptime + WordPress in one place" → Netwarden Solo ($9.90).
• "I run mail servers and care about RBL listings" → HetrixTools (blacklist monitoring).

You can also stack them. A common combo I see in homelabs: Uptime Kuma for the uptime fan-out (it has the best status pages), Netwarden for the actual machine intelligence on your cluster. They don't fight.

A note on "self-hosting" as a category

"Self-hosted" means different things to different people:

• Self-hosted-self-hosted: you run the whole stack. Uptime Kuma is this.
• Self-hosted-but-they-host-it: you install an agent, they host the dashboard. HetrixTools, Netwarden's current SaaS, are this.
• Pure SaaS: you ping URLs, they do everything else. StatusCake.

The first one is free in dollars but expensive in time. The second is the pragmatic middle. The third is the "I just want it to work" option.

Netwarden's roadmap has a single-binary self-hosted build (Bun-compiled, no separate Postgres) in preview. When that lands, Netwarden moves into the first category for people who want it. Until then, treat it as the second.

A real-world mini-architecture

For my own setup — five small things I want monitored, one Pi, one NAS, one VPS — what I actually run:

• Netwarden agent on the Pi (free tier covers it, picks up Plex/Pi-hole metrics for free)
• Uptime Kuma on the Pi too, monitoring the five external endpoints, status page published at status.example.com
• Email + mobile push for "host down" and "endpoint down for 3+ minutes"

Cost: $0/month. Time to set up: about 25 minutes. Time to maintain: I update Kuma's container quarterly and that's it.

If I added one more box (the WordPress site for my dad), I'd flip to the $9.90 Solo plan and consolidate into one tool — because at three boxes the "two-tool sprawl" stops being worth saving $9.90.

Doing it right now

If you want to try the all-in-one path:

curl -sSL get.netwarden.com | bash

Run that on your most-loved box, sign up at app.netwarden.com, paste the token, and you'll have host metrics, uptime, and alerts inside ten minutes. Free tier covers one host forever — try it on the Pi, judge for yourself.

If you want pure uptime, run the Uptime Kuma docker command from earlier. It is unironically great software.

If neither fits, that's fine. The point of this post wasn't to declare a winner.

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Keep Reading

• Monitor a Proxmox Cluster Without Datadog — When uptime checks aren't enough and you want VM-state alerts on your hypervisor.
• WordPress Monitoring: The Practical Cornerstone — Application-level telemetry that uptime checks alone will never give you.
• The Small-Team Monitoring Playbook — what to monitor (and what to skip) when you have 1-25 hosts.
• Service Discovery — How the agent figures out what you're running without any config.

Ready to consolidate? Install the agent with curl -sSL get.netwarden.com | bash and decide for yourself.