Server Uptime Monitoring Using Screpy

In this post, I will write about server uptime monitoring using Screpy, a SaaS (Software as a Service) tool for monitoring, optimizing and managing your server.In a previous post, I have talked about the need to monitor the uptime of your website. In that post, I discussed over 15 tools for monitoring website performance, such as Hetrix Tools and Uptime Robot . Some of these tools or SAAS (Software as a service) are free, while others follow the freemium model. A few, such as Phpservermonitor, are self hosted open source programs. This post was updated in March 2024.

Listen to the audio version of this post below

Background

During my research for the website or server uptime monitoring tools, I signed up for 6 different services. This was in late 2020. In January 2021, I published a follow-up post, in which I described how I discontinued two of these services. Since then, I have signed up for lifetime plan for Screpy from Appsumo. This post talks about Screpy’s features, my likes and dislikes, as well as final thoughts.These services monitor the uptime of websites and send alerts via SMS, email or slack when there is downtime. The methods they use include ping, http/s, UDP, and others.

Screpy for Server Uptime, Website SEO and Speed

Server Uptime Monitoring using Screpy

Screpy is an interesting tool that monitors uptime of servers and also makes suggestions for speeding up websites and applications for better SEO ranking. It sends alerts in case of service disruptions. I came across Screpy on AppSumo, and learnt more from the related discussions on facebook groups related to Lifetime SaaS deals.

Initially, I thought it was yet another uptime monitoring tools, like Uptime Robot or Hetrix Tools. During Black Friday 2020 I had got a year long subscription for Hetrix Tools. In my opinion, is a fairly competitive and robust website uptime monitoring tool. Since I currently have four active uptime monitors, did I really need a fifth one? The answer as you may have guessed, was no. However, I decided to sign up to test the waters with Screpy.

Looking under the hood : Tools of Screpy

I started looking at what Screpy had to offer. In a nutshell, it provides a dashboard for multiple sites that one manages. The basic plan from Appsumo that I bought included 10 sites or 10 projects.The dashboard shows the overall site health, uptime, seo scores, etc. But the interesting part begins once you connect a site with Screpy. The service does much more than monitoring uptime. It tells you some of the best practices for maintaining a healthy site, and the suggestions to implement changes. It crawls the site and highlights critical errors on your site if any. This includes, removing unused CSS, or, redundant software code that may exist. Next, it gives recommendations for some of the basic SEO, which includes hygiene factors such as reducing the image size, etc. It also prepares an index of all the pages on your website that will help in Google Page Speed. Using keywords, you can track whether your site ranks for those specific keywords. Finally, Screpy highlights any other issues that you need to handle , such as any any errors on the site. I had used a similar tool in the past, but most are standalone and single tool for single task. In case of Screpy, I thought that the suggestions for SEO score itself I was a pretty relevant feature.

Is Screpy a tool that believes in one size fits all?

For example, a lot of my sites, run on WordPress, and they have undergone multiple iterations over the years. For example in case of gaathastory.com. It was first hosted on a different content management system before I moved to WordPress. There is some legacy code and probably some other ghosts from the past as I like to say. Screpy detected them and rightly flagged them. Finally, Screpy has an auto crawling feature that checks for any new pages that may have been added to the site, say new blog posts. It also checks for any other issues that may exist on those pages, etc.

A quick overview of Screpy Website

The features I mentioned above are good to have, some are quite useful indeed. But the question arises, does Screpy do only the analysis and reporting? On their blog, as they recommend some best practices. I am a believer in ‘knowing what you are doing’, so reading up the documents, tutorials is important before hacking away your website. The frequently asked questions, on their site describes what Screpy basically stands for. All in all, this tool is useful, one that is worth keeping if you manage multiple websites.

What is the Pricing and Plans offered by Screpy?

Screpy is a paid service, and in addition to their paid plans, they do have a seven-day free trial. Overall, I think it’s worth paying the money. At the risk of repeating myself the service tracks for keywords, does an SEO audit, checks for speed of the pages etc. Very often, each of these tasks required a different tool. Screpy in a way is multiple tools combined in one. We have one login, one dashboard there and you can get multiple sited monitored. My plan has up to 10 projects, and so far I have connected four sites. Many others will get added in the days to come.

Final thoughts on monitoring server uptime using Screpy

I had not logged into my Screpy account for about two or three months,after purchasing the subscription. This was because of COVID and some other disruptions in life. In July this year, I thought it was a good time to take a look this tool.

So far so I still remain pretty positive about the investment. Once the team for gaathastory grows, I can create a team and then start adding team members to it, who would have different roles – features of Screpy that remain to be explored. In the coming times, I am looking forward to some more insights and share them as updated to the blog post. Hopefully that will improve the overall experience for you.

Give this tool a try, and you might be positively surprised on its usefulness.

End note

Screpy is available on Dealify as a Lifetime deal at the time of publishing. Link to my previous post on uptime monitoring:  Review of Uptime Monitoring Services and  Monitoring uptime for websites- January 2021 Update Listen to the audio You may want to check out:

1. PHP Server Monitor
2. Reviews on Capterra for server monitoring tools

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_{This post was updated on 2022-02-18 3 March 2024}