The fact that uptime is still at a premium has got to say something about the current state of the market. Having worked in IT since the late 90s and having used almost every major tool available over the last 20+ years, I find uptime.com to be by far the easiest and most intuitive web monitoring solution to use. It does exactly what it says on the tin and that alone would make me happy enough to recommend it. What really seals the deal is the ease of setup, setup of alerts and reporting. All three are just click away and then you're up and running. I think it's great that you can get uptime monitoring so cheap. As long as it's easy to use, I don't care how cheap it is! If the user interface was a little better (it could definitely be better) then I'd consider paying more for the service. But if it works, and it's easy to use, then I don't care how much money you charge. It's my favorite monitoring tool by far, and if you ask any other developer, system administrator, or anyone else involved with monitoring systems, you'll probably hear the same thing.