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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 200 hosts/services? Each service that you configure to be monitored is a check. So it could be a web site, or an SMTP server, or an FTP server, or any of the other check types that we provide. The interval of the monitoring doesn't matter. We charge the same for one minute checks and for five or fifteen minute checks.
Your price is way below other monitoring providers. What's the catch? There is no catch. We think the better question is why other providers charge so much for site monitoring. 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 support email, international SMS, voice, twitter direct message, and webhook notifications. Most services charge extra for more SMS or voice notifications, 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. If a plan includes a notification type (see our pricing page), it includes unlimited notifications of that type.

For SMS and voice notifications you may still have charges from your mobile carrier (we can't control that), but we won't charge you extra for more notifications. If you have trouble receiving our SMS or voice 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 all of our plans 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 - verify mail acceptance for a particular address, test for open relay, verify SSL certificates and get warnings before expiration.
  • POP3
  • IMAP4
  • DNS
  • MYSQL
  • RDP
  • Port Connect
  • Audio Streaming
  • RBL - Blacklists
  • SIP - VOIP servers
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. These are also listed in this handy text file.
North American Region
  • Fremont, California (CA) - USA (173.255.243.111)
  • Dallas, Texas (TX) - USA (204.11.60.100)
  • Atlanta, Georgia (GA) - USA (192.30.32.170)
  • Newark, New Jersey (NJ) - USA (108.61.56.241)
European Region
  • London, England (LD) - GB (89.32.145.126)
  • Amsterdam, Netherlands (NL) - NL (46.249.33.15)
  • 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 or 12 months in advance. There are other options for large customers, so ask for other alternatives if you have more than a few thousand checks.
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.
Do you have an API? Yes, we have an HTTP accessible RESTful API. See our Documentation for more information.
Do you have features for resellers, rebranding, whitelabels, or licensing of your code? We have a number of features aimed at making resellers and providers lives easier. These include separate subaccounts that are easily managed from your own login, branded notifications, and a powerful API for integration with your own provisioning systems. We also can provide branded sites.
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.