How an MSP picks an uptime monitor
Published . Updated .
This guide is a buying checklist for an MSP choosing an uptime monitor, and it works out what five, fifty, a hundred, and two hundred fifty sites cost.
Pick a monitor that prices per check rather than per client, gives each client a status page, confirms outages before alerting, and sends alerts into the PSA your techs already watch. Then trial it on one client site before rolling out.
"Best" is the wrong first word. The right first word is "fits." A monitor fits when the bill grows with the number of URLs, the client can open one page that is only theirs, the on-call is not paged for a single blip, and the alert shows up in the queue you already staff. Everything else is a feature you can add later, or a feature you will pay for and not use.
What should you decide before you look at prices?
Write the answers down. A trial without them turns into a demo of whoever had the slickest dashboard.
You are buying a check of a URL from outside the client's network, on a timer. You are not buying a promise that every second was observed. A one-minute check cannot see a twenty-second failure. The calculator is how you turn that limit into a sentence in the agreement.
You are buying a page per client. Read what that page should show before you are impressed by a template gallery. A public page of your whole client list is a liability.
You are buying an alert path. If the path is not the PSA, name the person who will read the other inbox on a Sunday. If it is the PSA, confirm email-to-ticket with one test message before you migrate forty sites.
- Price is per check, with a number you can divide.
- One status page per client, unpublished until you share it.
- Confirmation before the alert, and a recovery message.
- A path into the PSA, even if that path is email.
- A trial on one real client site, including a down and a recovery.
What do five, fifty, a hundred, and two hundred fifty sites cost?
Count sites as checks only if each site is one URL. A client with a website and a separate booking host is two checks. Then find the plan whose included checks cover the count, and divide that plan's monthly price by its included checks if you want a per-check figure. Do not divide by the number of clients. A ten-person firm and a two-person firm with the same URL list should pay the same.
Five sites fit on Free, which is $0.00 for 5 checks. Ten and fifty sites fit on Starter, $9.00 a month or $90.00 a year for 50 checks. One hundred fit on Pro, $15.00 a month or $150.00 a year for 100. Two hundred fifty fit on Business, $29.00 a month or $290.00 a year for 250. A year is ten months' price. Divide the monthly price by the included checks if you want a per-check number, and redo it if the price changes. The figures live on the pricing page so a quote does not drift from the product.
| Sites, if one site is one check | Plan that covers them | Monthly price on that plan | Checks included |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Free | $0.00 | 5 |
| 10 | Starter | $9.00 | 50 |
| 50 | Starter | $9.00 | 50 |
| 100 | Pro | $15.00 | 100 |
| 250 | Business | $29.00 | 250 |
If you need more than 250, extra checks on Pro and Business are a block of 100 at $8.00 a month, and you can add more than one. A block you can count is easier to put in a proposal. Compare the other vendors' entry prices in Pingdom alternatives before you treat any of these as the only shape on the market. Vendors change those pages often, and UptimeRobot quotes its prices in euros.
What should you believe about locations and about proxied sites?
Ask where the check runs, and whether the product will name a city. "By region, best effort" means the checker is placed on a network that has regions, and you do not get to claim "we saw this from Dallas" unless a checker ran there. A quorum across cities is a different feature. If you need it, buy a product that states it. Do not infer it from a map on the marketing page.
Ask what a check sees when the site is behind a CDN or Cloudflare's proxy. A normal request often measures the edge. The origin can be down while the edge still answers. If the client cares about the origin, the monitor needs an opt-in that proves the origin responded. If you only care that the public URL answered, say that in the agreement. Both are honest. Mixing them is how a green check and an angry client happen on the same hour.
How long do you need to keep history?
Match retention to the report you promised. A quarterly business review that quotes a percent needs the minutes, hours, or days behind that percent. Ninety days covers a quarter with a little room. A page that shows twenty-four hours is a different report from a page that shows a quarter. Ask for the grain: hours that are hours, days that are days. Then ask what happens to the raw minutes when you change the URL. A change that wipes history should be a known step, not a surprise in the review.
How do you trial it without betting the book?
Pick one client who will forgive a rough week. Add the real URL. Confirm you get a single down and a single recovery, not a mail per minute. Publish the status page to yourself before you send it to them. Point the alert at a test company in the PSA. Cause a short failure you control, such as a hosts-file block on a staging name, or a page you can take offline. Time how long the confirmation takes. Read the history the next day and see if you can explain the percent in one sentence.
Then add the next ten. Rolling out a hundred sites on the afternoon of the demo is how you discover the subject line is wrong in a hundred tickets.
How The Watchbill helps
The Watchbill was built around the checklist above. Each plan is priced by the number of checks it includes, so the bill follows your URL count rather than your client count. Free gives you 5 checks with email alerts, which is enough to run the one-client trial described above before you spend anything. When you outgrow it, Starter covers 50 checks, Pro covers 100, and Business covers 250. Pro and Business can also add blocks of 100 checks at $8.00 a month.
Each site is checked about every 60 seconds, and it's marked down or up only after two consecutive minutes agree, so a single blip doesn't page anyone. On Pro and Business, a confirmed outage can go to the ticket email address that ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA, or Syncro already turns into tickets, and the recovery follows the same path. Those plans can also send a signed webhook, a Microsoft Teams message, or a PagerDuty alert. Each client can have its own status page, which stays private until you publish it.
There are limits worth knowing before you buy. Checks are placed by region on a best-effort basis, and results are never labeled with a city. For a site behind Cloudflare's proxy, a normal check measures the edge, and checking the origin is a separate setting on that site. To see whether it fits your shop, create a free account and run the trial on one client site, or compare plans on the pricing page.
Sources
- Vendor pricing pages compared in the companion article, accessed the same day. Accessed October 10, 2026.