How to Get a Website Down Alert by Email

Ways to get a website down alert by email

1. Free uptime monitors: UptimeRobot, Better Stack and StatusCake all have a free plan. UptimeRobot's watches up to 50 addresses and checks each one every five minutes. Better Stack gives you 10 monitors with alerts by email and Slack. StatusCake gives you 10, also every five minutes. For a small site that's enough, and it costs nothing. The catch: another account, a dashboard to set up and come back to, and alert emails written for engineers. Checks every minute are on the paid plans.
2. Alerts from your host or platform: if your site runs on WordPress with Jetpack, you already have downtime monitoring for free. It checks every five minutes from several places, emails you when the site stops answering, and again when it's back. Cloudflare has health checks from its Pro plan up, and the big cloud providers can alert on a health check they already run. Nothing new to sign up for. The catch is that it only sees what that one provider can see.
3. A checker you run yourself: Uptime Kuma is free and open source, and many people like its dashboard better than the paid ones. One rule decides whether it helps you: it has to run on a different machine from the one it's watching, or it goes dark at the same moment your site does. So you need a small server somewhere else, and someone to keep that server running.
4. Paid monitoring that calls someone: Pingdom, Site24x7 and the paid plans of the tools above check every 30 or 60 seconds from many countries. When nobody reacts, they send a text, then call a phone, then try the next person on the rota. Worth it when an hour of downtime costs more than a year of the plan, and someone is actually on call.

A website down alert in one sentence

Write down the address and what 'working' means to you: 'mail me if my shop stops loading'. A real person sets it up. No account, no dashboard, nothing for you to keep configured. We check the site every minute, and as long as it answers, you hear nothing.

When it stops answering, we try again over a completely different network route. We only write when both fail, because one failed route can mean our line is broken, not your site. The letter reaches you two or three minutes after the site went quiet. It says in plain words what we saw: a request that timed out, a 500 error from the server, or a domain name that no longer resolves. If the name can still be looked up, the letter says whether it still points at a server, which tells you whether to call your host or your registrar. When the site comes back, a second letter says how long it was down in total.

If you like, a short note every week tells you the site has been fine and we're still watching. With any monitor, silence can mean nothing happened or the monitor itself died, and that note tells the two apart. The first 7 days are free with no payment details; after that it is $5/month for that one site, and it stops by itself if you don't subscribe. Reply once to stop.

Good to know about downtime alerts

Checking only the home page can miss the part that's actually broken. A shop whose checkout has failed often still shows a perfect home page. An app whose backend is dead still draws its own frame. So name a word that has to be on the page, like 'Add to basket' or 'Log in'. Then a page that loads but no longer works counts as down too.

False alarms are why people stop reading alerts. One failed check is not an outage. A restart, a dropped packet or one bad minute on the monitor's own line looks exactly like a dead server from outside. Whatever you use should check again before it writes, and ideally from a different network.

Knowing is not fixing. No alert keeps a site online. What it gives you is the time between the site going quiet and a customer noticing. Decide in advance who gets the letter and what they do about it. And if an hour of downtime is expensive, pay for something that rings a phone at three in the morning.

Try it — hand us this sentence:

Common questions