YouMonitor.Us is a distributed peer-to-peer monitoring service that puts your web site to work monitoring other sites for downtime, while other sites keep an eye on yours. The service is free, provided that you volunteer some CPU cycles and bandwidth from your server to monitor other sites, and YMU provides detailed downtime reports and instant notification of outages via SMS or email.
The way it works is fairly simple. Once you've signed up, you're prompted to install a script on your web server (they offer it in PHP, JSP, ASP and Perl). The script receives monitoring tasks from the YMU Control Center, and pings other web sites about 10 times per minute. Other web sites in the network will ping your site up to 5 times per minute. If anything is amiss on your site, a text message or email will be dispatched, and you'll also get regular reports about your site's activity over time.
The resource consumption by the script is very a low, according to YMU - approximately equal to 10 page views per minute. According to their site, running the script 100 times per minute would result in a modest CPU usage of 2-3%, memory usage of 8.5-9.5 MB, and bandwidth of 200 B/s for HTTP monitoring and 2 KB/s for HTTP transaction.
For now, the site is free to use as long as you agree to participate in the monitoring network by offering up your server to monitor other web sites. In the future, the site plans to offer a paid subscription model that would allow people to receive monitoring but not dish it out. The current planned pricing model is $9.99/month for 60 checks per hour; $29.99/month for 300 checks per hour; $4.99 for every 60 additional checks per hour, though that could change.
YMU is a pretty interesting concept. I haven't seen any other sites doing P2P web site monitoring, but it makes sense. Because all the service's clients are also providing the computers that are doing the monitoring, you get pinged from all over the global Internet. YouMonitor.Us currently has network computers operating on every continent (save Antarctica), and their coverage should grow as the service grows. As long as the resource consumption from running the script is negligible, as the company claims, and the script is secure -- which they also claim -- this could be a popular, cost effective, and useful service for webmasters.
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This could also be pretty useful to detect not just downtime, but network issues too. There are sometimes occasions where traffic from, say, Europe can't hit a certain US data center, but US traffic is unaffected (unfortunately, the pipe dreams about the Net being "self healing" aren't really true). This service, if it provided the right level of stats and information, could be a great indicator for telling your upstream provider(s) where the problems seem to be occurring.
Posted by: Peter Cooper | November 15, 2007 2:05 PMGreat service. It will help the webmaster a lot.
Posted by: Robert | November 15, 2007 6:40 PMWe can tag it with "monitoring 2.0".
Posted by: Collin | November 18, 2007 6:04 PMThere're several monitoring softwares on the Internet alreay, but still YouMonitorUs is a both useful and funny online service.
Posted by: Meigen | November 20, 2007 5:48 PMSo glad to see YMU covered in RWW community! Hope the readers who tried our "neighborhood watch"-kind web site monitoring services after reading Josh's article actually liked using it! Please note our service can also be used by BLOG sites perfectly.
Get your BLOG monitored by YouMonitor.Us and put a "Monitored by YMU" icon up on your site, from here: http://youmonitor.us/link_to_us.shtml
Just to answer some bloggers' questions re: our pricing... We will *always* provide FREE website monitoring (for up to 300 checks per hour, or, 5 checks per minute, which is VERY high frequency compare to our competitors out there) to those who choose to participate in the YouMonitor.Us P2P monitoring network (YMU-Net). The upcoming for fee service is for those who either require more than 300 checks per hour, or do not want to become a YMU-Node by contributing a fraction of resources, for some reasons. In other words, we will not charge most small/medium websites.
The pricing model listed here is not yet the final one. We are still debating internally on what the best balance is, including a yearly subscription model, which is going to be even lower than the already quite low monthly price tag. No matter how it looks like, the for fee service will come out at the end of the year.
"Help Us, Help You..."
Posted by: Joss Shen | November 22, 2007 7:00 AM-Joss Shen
http://YouMonitor.Us
Halloooo guys!!
Posted by: Mishelle | December 19, 2007 1:41 PMI think you've missed something interesting..
I was searching for a good and not much expensive site monitoring tool.
And here is what I found : www.monitis.com
There is a special offer for getting 50% discount and plus you can try the beta version totaly free on site mon.itor.us