If your site is small enough to run on a $7 webhosting plan then you probably don't need monitoring.

No, I don't mean to run your site on a web hosting. The thread topic was a monitoring service that pings a website and alerts you charging a ridiculous amount, in my opinion, for an extremely simple service to deploy SEPARATELY on a web hosting plan.

Well, if that amount seems ridiculous to you then you're looking at the wrong figure. Have you considered what it costs to have an engineer sit down and write a proper monitoring and alerting system? Even a small one, i.e. the proverbial curl-loop?

That is the figure you should be looking at because even if you assume only a single day of work you can already buy many months of pingdom service for the same money.

Moreover even the smallest monitoring utility takes quite a bit more effort than a single day once you take SMS alerts with backoff (you don't want to spam, right?), scheduled downtimes and overall babysitting into account. Been there, done that.

So, look at the big picture and those $10 bucks suddenly become a no-brainer.

but this is HN, not godaddy user forums.

Exactly. Setting up a cronjob to monitor and test your web application (be it Cloud, VPS, or dedicated) should be something everybody here can do with eyes closed or at least ask. Paying a pinger service sounds idiotic unless I'm missing something from that service. I'm surprised it even exists.