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Looking for dirt-cheap monitoring that actually calls me

General Discussion by pablowild 14 replies 4.6K views
pablowild

Member OP

#1

¡hola amigos! I am looking for monitoring that actually calls me when my $2/month HostHatch goes down—¿is very cheap I know! Jajaja—but I have lost money before when sites down and I not knowing. I try free UptimeRobot but SMS not free. I try Pingdom trial but too expensive after. ¿someone knows combination of free tiers that works? I am very passionate about this because my abuela she check my website for recipes and if down she call ME at 3am anyway so better I know first is it—jajaja. I delete this now and make shorter.

mediaaustin

Member

Deliverability Nerd

#2

SMS alerting is a deliverability problem masquerading as infrastructure.

For what it's worth, most "free SMS" routes terminate via gray-market aggregators with terrible reputation. Your alert ends up in the same queue as payday loan spam. If you actually want delivery, you need:

1. Direct carrier relationship (Twilio, not free)
2. Fallback to email with pristine SPF/DKIM/DMARC
3. Voice call via verified caller ID

The Raspberry Pi + Twilio trial approach someone will suggest? Trial credits expire. Your monitoring becomes unmonitored monitoring. I've seen this failure mode destroy businesses.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a $2 VPS deserves proportional alerting spend. Either $5/month proper monitoring or accept the risk.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️
SI

Member

#3

Your abuela is already the best monitoring system

StuSpock

Member

NTP fundamentalist

#4
mediaaustin said:
The Raspberry Pi + Twilio trial approach

Chur for the warning about trial credits. I've got a cron script on mine that just emails me, no sms, route via my home isp adds 12ms but it's free mate. Your gran's 3am calls probably cheaper than twilio in the long run?

wilmaethqn44

Member

2 #5

Sorry for the silly question but could I just use my phone somehow? I have a old android and im worried about breaking things. I pay for this small shop website at CloudCone and sometimes it goes down and I dont know until customers email me. I dont understand all the email geek stuff. Is there a simple way?

frames, tables, still valid HTML
tarekcai

Member

spaces are for websites

8 #6

Pi solution
Twilio trial
200 free texts
Enough for months
If careful
Script in python
Using requests
Check http
If fail
Twilio sends
Done
Code:

		import requests
		from twilio.rest import Client
		URL="http://example.com"
		if requests.get(URL).status!=200:
			Client().messages.create(
				body="down",
				from_="+twilio",
				to="+yourphone"
			)

Tabs for readability
Spaces are wrong
Always

LA

Member

#7

Twilio trial expires in 30 days though

Doug

Member

New Jersey

#8

Same, my abuela also finds every outage before I do

grabs popcorn, checks /r/drama
mediaaustin

Member

Deliverability Nerd

#9

I just saw this.

Doug said:
Same, my abuela also finds every outage before I do
The real question is whether we can get abuela SLA into the Contabo terms of service. 99.9% grandma uptime with a 3am phone call guarantee. More seriously though, the Twilio trial I mentioned does expire. If you want actual voice calls on zero budget, some of the hobbyist OVHcloud integrations -- https://www.ovhcloud.com -- can bridge webhook to SIP. It's janky but the call does ring.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️
Doug

Member

New Jersey

#10

70 days late but I just saw this and had to jump back in.

pablowild said:
Better I know first

Did you ever solve this? I ended up wiring a Vultr webhook to a Twilio trial with a cron job on an old phone. It is janky but it works. The trial credits lasted longer than I expected since I only need like two alerts a month.

Still curious if anyone found something actually free that doesn't die after 30 days

grabs popcorn, checks /r/drama

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