Personally, I don’t have any experience with their paid service, but for the average user its probably not necessary. Their benchmark tools are pretty handy though to see what page load times are like for a first time customer.
I set up a free monitoring deal with them and was blown away that my uptime was as high as it was - cool to see - but I can see how it may be overkill. We were up 99.7% last month!
“Page load time” is a nice Chrome extension that shows the load time of every page you visit in a small icon on your toolbar. You can use it to see how quickly your pages load, and also to keep an eye on the web at large.
For those of you who avoid Flash as much as possible as I do, there is also a non-Flash HTML5 version of speedtest.net accessible via the beta subdomain:
With Pingdom, the features you get depends on which subscription you have. For us, each “check” is performed from a few different locations around the world. We do this because perhaps a check will fail on a service or a website from one location, but not the other. By performing this check from a few locations, we will know if that service/site is down or not.
Pingdom is nice, but might be an overkill for one site - depending on which features you want from them…
** Check - a configuration with a domain name, HTTP request type, etc.
