We recently tried compiling a price comparison chart between Pingdom and some of our competitors in the uptime monitoring business, but the task turned out to be more or less impossible.
Why?
Because there are simply too many different factors involved, and everyone uses different price criteria. In fact, pricing in general is so complicated that several uptime monitoring companies have to have wizards on their websites to help people see how much their monitoring would cost.
We think that pricing complexity has gone too far in this business. Some of the things that companies are factoring into the price are:
- Type of check (ping, different kinds of HTTP checks, email, etc).
- Number of checks.
- Check intervals.
- How long logs are kept.
- Type of available reports.
- Number of monitoring locations.
Most companies combine several (or all) of the above criteria into their price. Calculating the price for one single check can be confusing, and as soon as you try adding a few different checks, calculating the price quickly gets out of hand (and often the price as well).
In short, it’s a mess. It’s confusing to us, and we’re in the business, so we can only imagine what the customers are thinking.
As we have mentioned, one of the main points of Pingdom is simplicity. We try to follow the famed K.I.S.S. rule (Keep It Simple, Stupid), so we have kept pricing as simple as possible. In fact, we only have one criteria: How many checks do you want?
