Autopinger started as a personal curiosity of mine to see if all the server responses from pingomatic and pingoat are indeed valid. I took them as benchmarks as they are the more popular services around. I came to realise that not all the pings actually went through successfully after trying out all services individually with my own code. I started to doubt the services because successful pings are displayed when the endpoint of the service is no longer be found. From then on, I decided to make my own pinging service.

I started by grabbing the all-inclusive ping list from the internet to test out each service and note if the endpoint is still in service. Then I went on the analyse each endpoint with fiddler, a HTTP debugging tool to see the actual response through and back from the server and to my surprise, some of these services are not returning good formatted xml response but the ping does go through. Hence I thought it would be a good idea to consolidate all these into one common ping service location, where we will remotely check your updates and ping for you. Though this is not new and is the Feedburner pingshot idea but I guess it would nice if I can provide such a service as well as keep track of the reliability of these endpoints which is now known as ping health. As I developed, I realised there are other advantages in doing so.

Hence I put forward to offer this as a free service for everyone and hope that you like it :-)