Why I stopped self-hosting Uptime Kuma and built a hosted alternative

#webdev #devops #opensource #sideprojects

I used Uptime Kuma for about a year. It's a great tool. Clean UI,
lots of integrations, active community. But at some point I realized
something annoying: I was spending more time keeping my monitor alive
than actually building my projects.

The problem with self-hosted monitoring

My setup was simple: a cheap VPS, Docker, Uptime Kuma running inside.
It worked fine until the VPS had a bad day. Or needed a restart.
Or an update broke something.

The irony is real: your uptime monitor needs its own uptime monitor.

And for a solo developer with three side projects, maintaining
infrastructure just to know when things break felt like too much overhead.

What I actually needed

When I thought about it, my requirements were simple:

Check my URLs automatically every few minutes
Send me a Discord message when something goes down
Tell me when it comes back up
Tell me WHY it went down, not just that it did

That last point bothered me most about existing tools. Getting an
alert that says "your site is down" is useful. Getting one that says
"connection timed out after 10s" or "SSL certificate error" is
actually actionable.

So I built PingWatch

PingWatch is a hosted uptime monitor. No server, no Docker,
no config files. You sign up, add your URL, pick your alert channel
(Telegram, Discord, Slack, or Email), and it starts checking
every 5 minutes.

The alert includes a short reason for the downtime. When the site
recovers, you get another message with the total downtime duration.

Setup takes under 2 minutes. I timed it.

Who it's for

Honestly, it's for developers like me. People who want monitoring
that just works without becoming a project of its own.

If you're running one or two side projects, an MVP, or a small SaaS,
you probably don't need a complex observability stack. You need
to know when your site is down, why, and when it's back.