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Features

What Pingstead does — and what it does not

Every claim on this page is something the service enforces. The technical details are here; the home page says the same in plain words.

Which pages are checked?

A site is one domain. Its home page is always checked; on the free plan you add up to 3 more URLs on the same domain or its subdomains.
  • Home pageHome pagehttps://example.com/Up
  • Pricinghttps://example.com/pricingUp
  • API healthhttps://api.example.com/healthUp
  • Bloghttps://blog.example.com/Up
4 of 4 URLs: the home page and 3 more.

What is one check?

One HTTP request, GET by default or HEAD. It passes when the final status is in the range you expect (200–399 by default) and, if you set a keyword, when the page contains it — or does not.
  • Up to 5 redirects, each checked like the URL itself
  • The certificate is validated as a browser would
  • At most 1 MiB of the response is read; nothing of it is stored
One check of example.com, from Amsterdam: 182 ms
DNS
12 ms
Connect
31 ms
TLS
48 ms
First byte
71 ms
Download
20 ms

How is the verdict reached?

All places check at the same scheduled moment. A failure is retried after 10 seconds. If most places still fail, the URL is down; if some fail, it is degraded. A place whose own connection test fails is not counted, so a problem on our side never turns your site red.

Amsterdam: Opened. Bangalore: Did not open. San Francisco: Opened. Works, not from India

San FranciscoUSIts own connection test failed — not counted

Certificate and domain

Every HTTPS host of your site is read every 12 hours, every 6 in the certificate’s last week. Its card warns 30 days before the certificate runs out and again, more urgently, 7 days before. The domain’s expiry is looked up daily over RDAP or WHOIS, more often as it gets close.

  • Some registries, such as .de, do not publish expiry dates — the card says so
  • A site on a shared host such as github.io has no domain card: that registration is the host’s

Certificate

example.com

Available
50days left
Valid

Valid for 50 more days

Valid until
Issuer
Let's Encrypt (R11)
Names
example.com, www.example.com
Checked Next check

What we deliberately do not do

So that you know exactly what the answer covers.
  • No alerts yet: you see states, incidents and expiry dates in your account
  • No JavaScript and no page rendering: a keyword added by a script is not found
  • No custom headers or request bodies; GET and HEAD only
  • No addresses in private or internal networks, and no ports other than 80, 443, 8080 and 8443
  • Nothing of a page’s content is stored
  • No status pages, server agents, ping, TCP or DNS monitors
  • No third-party scripts, trackers or analytics on this website