The Best Uptime Monitor for Side Projects (That Won't Drain Your Budget)

You shipped a side project. Maybe it's a tool you built for yourself that others might find useful. Maybe it's an API wrapper, a small SaaS, or a weekend hack that somehow got upvoted on Hacker News.

Now you have traffic. Not a lot — maybe a few hundred visitors a day. But enough that you'd be embarrassed if someone visited and saw a 502 error.

You need monitoring. But you don't need — and definitely can't afford — what most monitoring companies are selling.

Why Side Projects Have Different Monitoring Needs

Enterprise monitoring exists to guarantee SLAs, page on-call engineers, and produce uptime reports for customers paying thousands per month. None of that applies to your weekend project.

What side projects actually need:

• Know when it's down (within minutes, not seconds)
• Get an alert to your email (not a PagerDuty escalation chain)
• Cost nothing (or close to it)
• Take less than 5 minutes to set up
• Not require maintaining another server

What side projects don't need:

• Sub-second alerting latency
• Multi-region checking from 10 locations
• Incident management with runbooks
• Status pages with subscriber notifications
• A $29/month bill for 20 monitors you'll never use

The Side Project Monitoring Decision Framework

Not all side projects are equal. Your monitoring strategy should match where you are:

What Actually Works for Each Stage

Stage 1-2: The Free Setup

At this point, your goal is basic awareness. Here's the simplest reliable setup:

# Register (free, no credit card)
# Then create monitors for your key endpoints:

# 1. Your main page
curl -X POST https://watch.arkforge.fr/api/v1/watches \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url": "https://myproject.com", "interval_hours": 6}'

# 2. Your API (if you have one)
curl -X POST https://watch.arkforge.fr/api/v1/watches \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url": "https://myproject.com/api/health", "interval_hours": 1}'

That's it. Two monitors. One for your landing page (checked every 6 hours — it's static, it rarely breaks), one for your API (checked hourly). If either goes down, you get an email.

Total cost: $0. Total setup time: 2 minutes. Total infrastructure to maintain: nothing.

The "I'll build my own" temptation

At some point, every developer thinks: "I could build this myself in an afternoon." And you could. A cron job, a curl command, and a mail utility.

But here's what "building it yourself" actually looks like in practice:

1. Write the monitoring script (30 minutes)
2. Set up a cron job (5 minutes)
3. Configure email sending from the server (45 minutes of debugging SMTP)
4. Handle false positives from network blips (add retry logic, 30 minutes)
5. Realize your monitoring runs on the same server as your app (1 hour setting up a separate VPS)
6. The monitoring VPS needs monitoring too (existential crisis)

You've spent half a day and you now have two servers to maintain instead of one. Use a free service. It's not laziness — it's good engineering.

Features That Matter vs. Features That Don't

Features that matter for side projects

• Reliable email alerts. The alert must arrive. If the monitoring service itself has reliability issues, nothing else matters.
• Content change detection. Your server might return 200 OK but serve an error page (like when your app crashes and Nginx serves a default page). Good monitors check the actual response content.
• API access. You should be able to add and remove monitors from a script. If you can only configure it through a web dashboard, you'll forget to update it when you deploy new endpoints.
• Reasonable check intervals. Every 5 minutes is fine. Every hour is fine for most things. Every 30 seconds is overkill for a side project.

Features that don't matter (yet)

• Status pages. Your 50 users don't need a status page. They need your app to work.
• Multi-location checks. Unless you're running a CDN, checking from one location is fine.
• Incident management. There's no "team" to escalate to. It's you. An email is the incident management.
• Detailed analytics. Response time graphs are nice. But they won't help you grow from 50 users to 500.

Common Mistakes

1. Monitoring too many things

You don't need to monitor every endpoint. Focus on your health check endpoint (catches server/database issues) and your main page (catches DNS/CDN/deployment issues). That's it.

2. Setting check intervals too aggressive

Checking every 30 seconds means 2,880 checks per day per endpoint. For a side project with no SLA, every 5-60 minutes is perfectly fine. Your users won't notice 10 minutes of downtime, but they'll definitely notice if your monitoring burns through a free tier's quota in a week.

3. Not monitoring at all

The most common mistake. "I'll set up monitoring later" means "my site has been down for three days and I found out from a Reddit comment." It takes two minutes. Do it now.

4. Over-engineering the solution

You don't need Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager + a dedicated monitoring VPS for a side project that gets 200 visitors a day. Match your monitoring complexity to your actual needs.

The One-Command Setup

Here's a complete monitoring setup for a typical side project. Copy, paste, modify the URLs, and you're done:

#!/bin/bash
# setup-monitoring.sh
# Run once after first deploy

API_KEY="your_arkwatch_api_key"
BASE="https://watch.arkforge.fr/api/v1/watches"

# Monitor your landing page (every 6 hours)
curl -s -X POST $BASE \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"url\": \"https://yourproject.com\", \"interval_hours\": 6}" \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json; print('Landing page monitor:', json.load(sys.stdin).get('id','error'))"

# Monitor your API health (every hour)
curl -s -X POST $BASE \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"url\": \"https://yourproject.com/api/health\", \"interval_hours\": 1}" \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json; print('API monitor:', json.load(sys.stdin).get('id','error'))"

echo "Monitoring configured. You'll get emails if anything goes down."

Save it, run it once, and move on to building features your users actually care about.

TL;DR

• Side projects need simple, free, external monitoring.
• Monitor 2 things: your main page and your API health endpoint.
• Email alerts are enough until you have paying customers.
• Don't build your own monitoring for a side project. Use a free API.
• Set it up in 2 minutes during your first deploy. Don't wait.

The best monitoring system for a side project is one that exists. Set it up, ship your feature, and stop worrying about silent downtime.

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