Uptime Kuma vs hosted monitoring: who monitors the monitor?

Uptime Kuma is great free, self-hosted software. The real trade-offs of running your own monitoring, and when a hosted monitor (or both) makes more sense.

October 7, 2026 · 4 min read · By the Spot Downtime team

Uptime Kuma is a great piece of open-source software: free, self-hosted, with a friendly interface, dozens of notification integrations and status pages. For a homelab or a hobby project, it's hard to beat. The question isn't whether it's good. It's whether running your own monitoring is the right job for you.

The catch with self-hosted monitoring

Who monitors the monitor?

If Uptime Kuma runs on the same server, network or cloud region as your app, it goes down with it, and nobody gets an alert. Running it somewhere separate fixes that, but now you have a second server to keep up, and something still has to watch that.

Maintenance is on you

Updates, backups of its database, security patches for the host, TLS for its dashboard, disk space as check history grows. Small jobs, but they never stop, and they tend to get skipped.

One location

Like any single server, it sees the internet from one place. That's true of Spot Downtime too; the difference is who runs it.

Uptime Kuma vs Spot Downtime

	Uptime Kuma	Spot Downtime
Price	Free software + your server	Free for 20 monitors; $7 or $19/mo
Setup	Install, secure and update it yourself	Sign up and add a URL
Runs independently of your app	Only if you host it elsewhere	Yes
Monitor limits	None	20 / 50 / 150 by plan
Team accounts & roles	One admin account	Seats with owner, admin and member roles
Status pages	Yes	Yes, with email subscribers and custom domains
Notification integrations	Very many	12, including Slack, Teams, PagerDuty and webhooks
Open source	Yes	No

Choose Uptime Kuma if…

You enjoy running your own services, and already have a separate, reliable place to host it.
You need to monitor things only reachable inside a private network.
You want hundreds of monitors and don't want to pay for them.

Choose a hosted monitor if…

The monitoring must keep working when your own infrastructure doesn't.
Several people need their own accounts, or customers need a status page with email updates.
You'd rather spend the maintenance time on your product.

Or use both

Plenty of teams run Uptime Kuma for internal services and a hosted monitor for the public site, plus one hosted check on Uptime Kuma itself. Spot Downtime's TCP and ping monitors are a cheap way to make sure the monitoring box is alive.

Open port checkerCheck from the internet whether a service's port is reachable.All uptime tools comparedHosted and self-hosted options side by side.

Related: UptimeRobot alternatives, now that its free plan is personal use only.