Self-Hosted Server Status Page with Uptime Robot, S3, and Upscuits

Posted by Ross Poulton on Tue 20 January 2015 #geeky #code #servers #django

For quite a while I've had a public "Status" page online for WhisperGifts via Pingdom. It basically just shows uptime over the past few days, but given my site is relatively low-volume and not ovely critical to my customers, the $10/month for Pingdom was actually one of my largest expenses after hosting.

So, I started looking for an alternative.

Today I re-deployed the WhisperGifts Status Page using a combination of Uptime Robot, Upscuits and Amazon S3.

In short, I have Uptime Robot checking the uptime of my site (including it's subsites, such as the admin and user pages). The statistics are gathered and presented by Upscuits, which is entirely client-side JavaScript hosted on S3.

My basic todo list for next time:

  1. Sign up for Uptime Robot. I'd been using them for ages on their Free plan as a backup to Pingdom; this gives 5-minute checks. Their paid plan gives 1-minute resolution.
  2. Add your sites, make sure they're being monitored correct.
  3. On the Uptime Robot dashboard, click My Settings. Open the section labelled Monitor-Specific API Keys and search for your Monitor. Copy the API key to a text file for later; repeat this step for subsequent monitors you want to include on your status page.
  4. Download the latest Upscuits release to your PC.
  5. In the public folder of the upscuits package, rename config.example.js to config.js. Paste your API key(s) inside it.
  6. Create an AWS bucket called eg status.mysite.com and enable website mode. Setup your DNS etc to point to this bucket.
  7. Upload the contents of public/ to your AWS bucket
  8. Visit your new status page and view your last 12 months of Uptime Robot statistics
  9. Close your Pingdom account saving $10 a month Profit!

For a small site like mine this has a couple of obvious benefits. It's free (or $4.50/month if you want higher resolution - still half the price of the most basic Pingdom plan); it uses a tiny amount of S3 storage which is as good as free, and doesn't involve running any server-side code. The included index.html is also easily customisable if you like, since it's just plain HTML (using the Bootstrap framework, by default). This is a big win over hosted solutions, IMO.