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For site owners

How our checks behave

If you found Pingstead in your server logs: a user of this service has added a URL of your site to be checked. This page explains what we send and how to stop it.

User-Agent

Every request our checks make carries this header:
Pingstead/c7aeab21cd20 (+https://pingstead.xyz/bot)

The number after the slash is the version of our checking software and changes with releases; the address is this site’s.

What a check sends

  • One GET request to the URL, or HEAD if the user chose it, with these headers only: User-Agent, Accept: */*, Accept-Encoding: gzip, br and Connection: close.
  • No cookies, no request body, no JavaScript. We read at most 1 MiB of the response and keep only the status code and the timings; nothing of the content is stored.
  • We follow at most 5 redirects, and check every redirect target the way we check the URL itself.
  • We do not read robots.txt: each check is of one URL a user asked us to watch, much like a person opening that page.

How often, from where

  • Each URL is checked from each location every 5 to 60 minutes, as the user chose. A failed check is repeated once, 10 seconds later.
  • A user can ask for one extra check of a URL at most once a minute.
  • From one location we open at most 2 connections to the same host at a time.
  • Separately, our main server opens one TLS connection to each HTTPS host every 12 hours (every 6 hours close to the certificate’s expiry) to read its certificate. Domain expiry is read from the domain’s registry, not from your server.
  • At most 5 accounts can watch the same domain, with up to 4 URLs each, so a domain receives at most 20 scheduled requests from each location every 5 minutes, plus retries and extra checks.
  • From the servers in Amsterdam, Bangalore and San Francisco. We do not publish fixed IP addresses; filter by the User-Agent above.

How to stop the checks

Write to sagitta0401@gmail.com and name your domain. We add it to our block list: the checks of every URL on it, by every account, stop within a minute, and the domain cannot be added again.

You can refuse our requests at your server or firewall by their User-Agent. The user who added your URL will then see the status your server returns.