How to Monitor a Website’s Uptime for $0.75/month on Amazon

If you’re like me, you care if your website goes down.

There have been services available for years that monitor your site and let you know if it goes down. The one I’ve been using for over a decade is Pingdom, which is great. It gives you tons of advanced options like searching for text within probe responses, controlling where your probes come from, etc.

But the plan I had was around $15/month—which I found a bit pricey since I just needed basic monitoring.

Being an Amazon fan, and knowing that they seem to have an offering for everything, I started digging into whether I could create a simple monitor on their platform. And sure enough—you can—on Route 53.

Route 53 Monitor Geos

And the process is dead simple.

1) Log into your AWS Console and navigate to the Route 53 dashboard.

Adding a Route 53 Check

2) Configure your check based on your site attributes and preferences.

I recommend setting your check to the minimum of every 30 seconds, with all geos enabled, and set the threshold to a single failure.

3) Save your check configuration.

You now have a check that will monitor your site—every 30 seconds—and let you know via email if it ever goes down.

For $0.75.

Pingdom and the like are great for heavy lifting, but this more than does the job for me.