One website you can remember to check. Five client sites plus staging requires a system. Cloud monitoring typically costs $10–30/month; your own machine can do the job free.
Updated August 2026 · 6 min read
| Situation | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Your machine stays on during work hours | A desktop app covers it fully |
| Freelancers with 5–20 client sites | Desktop app + per-site history |
| Mission-critical e-commerce, 24/7 | Cloud primary, desktop secondary |
| Near-zero budget | Desktop app: one-time cost, no subscription |
Also: menu bar monitoring on macOS, terminal-based monitoring and free checks for a down site.
Yes, as long as it doesn't enter full sleep. On macOS the network stays active in standby; on Windows disable full sleep or schedule wake timers. For round-the-clock critical monitoring, a cloud service remains more reliable than a laptop that powers down.
Every 1–5 minutes is typical for production sites. More frequent checks create false alarms from brief network blips; less frequent (15+ min) misses short outages. Consider requiring two consecutive failures before alerting.
No monthly fee, no account, and data never leaves your machine. The trade-off: monitoring stops when your computer shuts down. Many people pair the desktop tool during work hours with a cloud service for night coverage.
Yes. Give the tool full URLs — e.g. /checkout or /login. A homepage can return 200 while the payment flow is broken; the pages that make money are the ones worth watching.
Related: macOS menu bar monitor · CLI monitoring · Free down checks