Frequently (and some occasionally) Asked Questions about NodePing's Server Monitoring Services

What's a NodePing? It is an admittedly geeky name, but hey we're geeks. The term "node" can have several meanings. The one we are meaning is generically "something on a distributed network or in the cloud." In other words, the device your site or service is running on. A ping is a networking utility used to test the reachability of something on a network. Actually, the point of NodePing is monitoring services, not devices, and HTTP checks are more common than PING checks, but we didn't think "Lots of HTTP checks and some other stuff" had the same ring to it.
OK, I get the NodePing thing, but what's with the tagline? What is "All your nodes are pinged by us" supposed to mean? It's an older Internet meme, as memes go. Its a reference to a game from the '90's with dialog that was very poorly translated from Japanese. The original phrase was "All your base are belong to us." The line caught on (or it wouldn't be a meme), to the point that YouTube used it once when the service was down for a while. As a tag line, it sounded better than "Somebody set us up the bomb."
What do you mean by 1000 hosts/services? Initially when we started getting this question it surprised us, but we realize that the site monitoring marketplace is littered with misleading promises from providers that seem to offer a lot for low prices, and then add much larger fees if you actually want to do anything useful, like actually monitor something. At NodePing we really let you set up monitoring checks on up to 1000 services. We don't charge more if you check more often, or if you add a few more URL's. So you could monitor 1000 websites every minute, or 1000 pings every minute, or 1000 SMTP servers every minute, or any combination of those that adds up to 1000 services to check, and we'll happily run your checks for one flat $10 price.
Really $10? What's the catch? There is no catch. We think the better question is why other providers charge so much for site monitoring. It doesn't cost us significantly more to let you run 100 checks than it does if you run 5. We set a limit of 1000 because we don't want Google to start monitoring their data centers with our service (not that they would). We think a great tool for a simple low price is a winner. We hope you think so too, and tell all your friends.
What types of notifications do you send and how much does it cost? We currently support email and international SMS, which are both included in the $10/month flat rate. Most services charge extra for SMS, but we think this unduly complicates account management for most people. A monitoring service should just work, and shouldn't require you to keep track of how many notification or SMS points you have.

For SMS notifications you may still have charges from your mobile carrier (we can't control that), but we won't charge you extra for SMS notifications. International SMS is a little tricky, as in involves a mashup of licensing and contract issues between the various mobile providers. If you have trouble receiving our SMS notifications please let us know and we'll work to sort it out.
How many users/contacts do I get with my account? Unlimited users and contacts on each account allows you to have as many people as you want help you with monitoring and notifications. It's all included in the flat rate $10/month so add as many as you like.
What services or protocols do you check? Currently our monitoring check list includes
  • HTTP/S - basic website checker for any URL and on non-standard ports
  • HTTP/S Content Matching - for deeper website monitoring. This check supports both positive and negative content checks.
  • SSL Certificates
  • SSH with response matching
  • FTP
  • PING - real ICMP, not pseudo-ping like many companies
  • SMTP
  • POP3
  • IMAP4
  • DNS
  • MYSQL
  • RDP
  • Port Connect
If you have a need for a specific type of check not listed above, please drop us a line.
Do you run checks from multiple locations? Yes. When one location shows that a site or server is down, we immediately and automatically recheck from other locations to confirm the result before sending out up or down notifications. You have the choice of which regions you want each check to run from. Current check locations are listed below and we're working on adding more regions and locations.
North American Region
  • Fremont, California (CA) - USA (173.255.243.111)
  • Dallas, Texas (TX) - USA (69.164.201.21)
  • Atlanta, Georgia (GA) - USA (74.207.232.246)
  • Newark, New Jersey (NJ) - USA (96.126.109.97)
European Region
  • London, England (LD) - GB (89.32.145.126)
  • Amsterdam, Netherlands (NL) - NL (46.102.247.214)
  • Falkenstein, Germany (DE) - DE (78.47.40.108)
  • Bucharest, Romania (RO) - RO (89.45.249.16)
What kinds of payment do you take? We accept Visa, MasterCard, JCB, Discover, Diners Club and American Express. We charge the monthly fee to your credit card automatically on a monthly basis. There is more information about our billing in our Terms Of Service. We will also accept Paypal for those who would like to pay 6 months or more in advance.
Can you add a check for [some other service we don't do yet]? Yes, we can. Please let us know what would be useful.
What tech is this service based on? Basically, lots of Javascript and JSON. Node.js, CouchDB, Redis, and jQuery. The web app is Node.js on the server and jQuery on the client. The checks are all Node.js, with a distributed "pingrunner" architecture communicating via sockets. The asynch IO provided by Node.js is what allows us to run gobs (that's a technical term) of checks per server in parallel.