Pingdom.com bot

The Pingdom.com bot is the monitoring crawler for the Pingdom service, which helps site owners track uptime, performance, and page speed. It functions as both a site monitor and a speed tester, regularly checking websites based on a schedule set by a Pingdom customer. The bot identifies itself in server logs with several user-agent strings, including Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4 and pingbot/2.0. It operates from a wide range of global IP addresses and is designed to load pages completely to verify their functionality and measure performance.

The Pingdom.com bot is visiting your website because someone has configured a monitoring service for your site using Pingdom. This could be you, a member of your team, or a third party with a legitimate interest in your site's availability. The bot does not randomly crawl the web; it only visits the specific URLs that a Pingdom customer has asked it to monitor. The frequency of its visits is determined by the monitoring plan that has been set up, which can range from checks every minute to once a day.

The purpose of the Pingdom.com bot is to support the Pingdom monitoring service. Its functions include uptime monitoring (alerting owners to outages), performance testing (measuring page load times), and transaction monitoring (ensuring key user flows are working). The data it collects helps website owners maintain a reliable service by quickly identifying and resolving issues. The bot provides direct value to the website being monitored by helping to minimize downtime and optimize performance.

Blocking the Pingdom.com bot is generally not recommended if you or someone on your behalf is using the service to monitor your site. Blocking it will render the monitoring service ineffective. However, if you must block it, you can add a rule to your robots.txt file.

To block this bot, you can use one of its user-agent strings. Add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: pingbot
Disallow: /