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// Uptime

Is your site up right now?

Enter an address. This asks for it the way a browser would, follows the redirects and tells you exactly what came back. Free, no signup. If it is working, you can then have it watched for fourteen days and emailed the moment it stops.

One request, following redirects, with a 64 KB cap and a ten-second ceiling. Nothing is scanned, enumerated or probed, and no address is asked for.

// The checks

What this actually asks

Whether anything answers

The check asks for your address the same way a browser does. It waits up to ten seconds. If nothing comes back in that time — no page, no error page, nothing at all — the site is down, and that is what a visitor gets too.

Sometimes a server starts replying and then drops the connection halfway. The tool says so separately, because "there is nothing there" and "something is there and falling over" are two different conversations with your host.

The redirects, all the way to the end

Most addresses redirect at least once. Plain http goes to https, or the bare domain goes to www. So the tool follows the trail, up to ten hops, and judges whatever it lands on rather than the first answer.

It also catches the trail that never lands. A redirect loop is usually an https rule and a www rule sending each other back and forth, and browsers simply give up. From a visitor's side that is indistinguishable from the site being off, so the tool treats it as down. The Redirect Chain Checker walks the whole trail if you want to see where it turns around.

What the server actually said

A 5xx means the request reached your application and the application failed. That is down. A 500 usually points at code or a database that is not answering, while a 502 or 503 usually means the web server is fine and whatever sits behind it is not.

A 4xx is different. The server is up and working correctly — it is telling you there is nothing at that particular address. Worth knowing, but not an outage, so it reports as a warning instead.

The secure connection, separately from the server

A certificate problem is reported on its own rather than lumped in with "down". The reason is that the two need completely different fixes, and the symptoms look nothing alike from the inside.

When a handshake fails, your server is running perfectly. Visitors just get a full-page security warning instead of your site, and almost nobody clicks past one. Worse, it often keeps loading fine for you, because your own browser already trusts the old certificate. The SSL Certificate Checker tells you which part is wrong.

How long it took

The pass line shows the time to the final response, in milliseconds, along with the address that answered.

It is deliberately not a verdict. One sample cannot tell you whether a site is slow — that needs many measurements over time, and printing a judgement off a single request would be a guess dressed up as a fact. So the number is there to read, and nothing is claimed about it.

Then, if you want it, fourteen days of watching

The trial checks the same address every five minutes for fourteen days. It emails you when it goes down and again when it comes back. Nothing starts until you click the link in the confirmation email.

Down means two consecutive failed checks, never one. Networks blink, and a monitor that shouts about every blip is one you learn to ignore. Recovery, on the other hand, only takes one good check. Slow to alarm, quick to stand down.

You get one email per outage, not one per check. If a certificate is about to expire during the fortnight, you get told at 14 days and again at 3, because a lapsed certificate is the most common outage that nobody sees coming.

What is stored, and when it is deleted

The instant check stores nothing at all. No address is asked for and none is kept.

The trial keeps two things: the email address you gave and the URL being watched. There is no name field, no message box and no account. When the fortnight ends, everything is deleted seven days later. A signup nobody confirms is deleted after 48 hours.

Stopping it is one button on your own trial page, with no login and no reply-to-unsubscribe. The link is in every email I send you.

Nobody finds out from a dashboard.

They find out when a customer calls. If your site going down would cost you real money and nothing is currently watching it, that is worth a short conversation.

Send me a message ↓

Prefer to talk? Book a free call ↗  ·  Or hire me on Upwork ↗  ·  Typical reply within one business day.

// FAQ

Questions

Is the instant check really free?
Yes, and it stays that way. No account, no email address, no signup, and nothing hidden behind a wall. You see the verdict, what answered, and the checks that passed. What I charge for is monitoring set up properly across everything you run — not for telling you whether your own site is up.
Why do you need my email address for the trial?
Because the alert is the product. The trial is fourteen days of me watching your site and emailing you when it breaks, so there has to be somewhere to send that. The check itself never needs an address, and it never will.
What counts as down?
Nothing answering, a connection that fails, a timeout, a server error in the 5xx range, or a failed secure connection. A redirect loop counts too, because a visitor never reaches a page. A 404 does not count on its own — the server is up and answering — but if your site was working and then starts returning one, that is a real failure and you will hear about it.
Why wait for two failed checks before alerting me?
Because one failure is usually the network having a moment, not your site going down. Alerting on a single blip is how monitoring becomes noise, and once you start ignoring the alerts the whole thing is worthless. Two consecutive failures five minutes apart is a much better signal. Recovery is the opposite: one good check and you are told it is back.
How many emails will I actually get?
One when it goes down, one when it comes back, and one at the end of the fortnight. Not one per check. There is a hard ceiling of six a day per address on top of that, so a site that flaps all night cannot fill your inbox. If nothing ever breaks, you will hear from me exactly twice: the confirmation, and the summary at the end.
Where do the checks come from?
One server, in one place. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the real limitation of a free trial: if the network between here and you has a problem, this reports your site as down when it is fine for everyone else. Checking from several locations and only alerting when more than one agrees is part of what a proper setup does, and it is one of the things I set up for clients.
How many sites can I watch, and for how long?
One address, for fourteen days. The trial runs at a fixed size — fifty targets across everybody — so that the checks stay on time and I am not pointing this server at hundreds of other people's sites. If it is full, the form says so rather than putting you in a queue.
What do you do with my email address?
Send the alerts for your site, and nothing else. There is no list, no newsletter and nobody else gets it. It is deleted seven days after the trial ends, and you can delete it yourself at any point with the button on your trial page. If you never confirm the signup, it is deleted after 48 hours and I never checked anything.
Can I sign somebody else up?
No, and that is deliberate. Nothing is checked and no alerts are sent until somebody clicks the link in the confirmation email. If that email arrives and you did not ask for it, ignore it — the request deletes itself after two days and you will not hear from me again.
Does this replace real monitoring?
For one small site, honestly, it might be enough. For anything you actually depend on it is not, and I would rather say so. Real monitoring watches from more than one place, covers certificates and domain renewals as well as the site, sends alerts where your team already looks, and keeps history you can show a client. That is a setup rather than a signup, and it is what I do for a living.
Do you store the addresses people check?
The instant result is cached for 60 seconds so a refresh does not hammer the site, and the rate limiter counts requests per visitor and per host — 20 and 10 an hour. Nothing else is kept. Result pages are also marked noindex, so a check you share cannot become a search result carrying somebody's domain.
Will this slow my site down?
No. It is one request every five minutes, it stops reading after 64 KB, and it gives up after ten seconds. That is less traffic than a single visitor browsing two pages, and far less than any search engine crawling you. Nothing is scanned, probed or enumerated — it asks for one address, the way a browser would.