An uptime monitoring service that helps users to get acknowledged of the downtimes of their websites/servers and also track their performance.

Self-hosted uptime monitoring tool with a polished UI, 90+ notification integrations, and built-in public status pages.

Compare Instatus, Atlassian Statuspage, Better Stack and UptimeRobot. Public packaging checked 15 September 2026.

Compare UptimeRobot, Better Stack, Pingdom and Checkly. Public packaging checked 15 September 2026.

Monitors cron jobs, background workers, and scheduled tasks by expecting periodic HTTP pings and alerting you when they stop arriving on time.

UptimeRobot's free tier is one of the most generous in monitoring — 50 monitors on 5-minute checks, and their machine-readable pricing.md is genuinely agent-friendly. If email alerts and a dashboard are all you need, keep using them. The wedge is alert delivery: webhook alerts require the Team plan (~€35/mo), Slack integration starts at Solo, and heartbeat/cron monitoring is paid-only — and their new dependency monitoring launches paid-only too. Mockbird's version: one curl (no account) arms a 30-minute check on any public URL with webhook down/up alerts — Slack and Discord payloads auto-detected, everything else gets HMAC-signed JSON — plus a status page, README badge and Atom feed. Heartbeats free. Honest limits: 30-min checks (theirs are 6x faster), 3 monitors per IP per day, small free capacity.

How I built HarvestGuard AI for the CII Post-Harvest Innovation Hackathon: a Gemini Vision + scikit-learn pipeline that estimates produce shelf life from a photo. Covers the real build order across AI Studio, Stitch, Antigravity, and Jules, the merge-conflict mess from five parallel async PRs, and swapping UptimeRobot for a free GitHub Actions monitor.

An uptime monitoring service that helps users to get acknowledged of the downtimes of their websites/servers and also track their performance.

Monitors cron jobs, background workers, and scheduled tasks by expecting periodic HTTP pings and alerting you when they stop arriving on time.

An uptime monitoring service that helps users to get acknowledged of the downtimes of their websites/servers and also track their performance.

Choosing a monitoring tool usually comes down to one question first: do you want to run it yourself, or pay someone else to? Everything downstream cost, setup time, reliability, who's on the hook when it breaks flows from that one decision. Uptime Kuma, UptimeRobot, and Healthchecks.io each answer it differently, and they're not actually direct competitors in every dimension: two are general-purpose uptime monitors, one is a cron-job specialist, and one can be either self-hosted or SaaS depending on how you want to run it.

I woke up to two emails that immediately caught my attention. One was from my website monitoring service (I use UptimeRobot, no affiliation) reporting that a client's website was down. The other was from my VPS provider informing me that they had suspended my VPS due to abuse. I logged into the control panel and immediately noticed a massive CPU spike. The server had gone from its usual 15–20% CPU usage to a sustained 100% for nearly four hours before the provider shut it down under their fair usage policy. My first clue was `xmlrpc.php`. It was consuming a significant amount of resources, so I started researching it. I'm not primarily a WordPress/PHP developer, and I was surprised to learn that XML-RPC exposes functionality for remote management of WordPress. I disabled XML-RPC, brought the VPS back online, and thought the problem was solved. It wasn't. The next day I woke up to the exact same two emails. This time my VPS provider had already imposed CPU limits on the server. I noticed a few kernel-looking processes consuming CPU, assumed they were related to the throttling, and restarted the VPS. A few hours later, it was offline again. At that point I knew I was dealing with a compromise rather than a performance issue. I began investigating the WordPress installation and immediately found obvious signs of infection. There were numerous malicious PHP files (`index.php`, `cache.php`, etc.) buried inside recursively nested directories such as: image/image/image/image/cache.php The deeper I looked, the worse it became. The attackers had created: * A rogue WordPress administrator account * An unauthorized SSH key * A root-level user on the VPS * An administrator account inside CyberPanel This wasn't just a compromised website anymore. It was a full VPS compromise. My working theory was that the attackers exploited a vulnerable WordPress component (likely allowing arbitrary PHP upload or remote code execution), established persistence, and pivoted into the operating system. Then I found a suspicious process called `libnet-cache`. At first glance it looked like a legitimate kernel process, but it wasn't. Every time I killed it: kill -9 <pid> it immediately reappeared. Something else was respawning it. I started tracing persistence mechanisms. Systemd? Found one malicious service. Cron? Found multiple malicious cron jobs. I tried deleting them. Permission denied. That made no sense. I was root. After some research I discovered the files had the immutable (`i`) attribute set. Normally you remove it with: chattr -i <file> Except... that also returned permission denied. Even the `chattr` binary itself had been tampered with. Fortunately its permissions were recoverable, allowing me to restore it and finally remove the immutable attribute. From there the cleanup became much more methodical: * Removed immutable attributes * Deleted malicious services * Removed malicious cron jobs * Deleted unauthorized users * Removed rogue SSH keys * Reinstalled WordPress core using WP-CLI * Deleted every malicious PHP file from `wp-content/uploads` * Rotated credentials * Reviewed the rest of the server for persistence The root cause appeared to be a compromised WordPress site that allowed the attackers to gain remote code execution, escalate their foothold, establish persistence, and eventually deploy a cryptocurrency miner. My VPS had become someone else's mining rig. One compromised website was all it took to lose an entire VPS. Here is a list of commands which I used (thanks to ChatGPT) Here are some of the most useful commands from the investigation, grouped by purpose. ### Initial Investigation top htop ps aux --sort=-%cpu | head -20 ps -ef pstree -p lsof -p <PID> ss -tulpn netstat -tulpn ### Finding Suspicious PHP Files find /home -type f \( -name "*.php" -o -name "*.phtml" \) find /home/*/public_html/wp-content/uploads \ -type f \( -name "*.php" -o -name "*.phtml" \) find /home -type d | grep "image/image" find /home -type f -mtime -7 ### WordPress Investigation wp core verify-checksums wp core download --force wp plugin list wp user list wp option list wp cron event list ### Finding Persistence systemctl list-units --type=service systemctl list-unit-files systemctl status <service> crontab -l cat /etc/crontab ls -la /etc/cron.* find /var/spool/cron -type f -exec cat {} \; ### Finding Unauthorized Users cat /etc/passwd last lastlog getent passwd ### SSH Investigation cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys find /home -name authorized_keys grep "ssh" /var/log/secure ### Process Investigation ps auxf readlink -f /proc/<PID>/exe ls -l /proc/<PID>/exe strings /proc/<PID>/exe lsof -p <PID> ### Finding Immutable Files lsattr <file> lsattr -R /etc chattr -i <file> ### Finding Recently Modified Files find / -mtime -2 find / -ctime -2 find / -newermt "2026-07-22" One command that often surprises people during an incident is: readlink -f /proc/<PID>/exe It tells you the actual executable backing a running process. Malware frequently disguises itself with names like `kworker`, `kthreadd`, `libnet-cache`, or `systemd`, but this command reveals the real binary on disk, making it invaluable during Linux incident response.

Compare the best Cronitor alternatives in 2026, including AppSignal, Better Stack, Checkly, Healthchecks.io, and UptimeRobot.