Updated 25 October 2026 · By the Upcertain team
A setup that fits in ten monitors
| Monitor | What it catches |
|---|---|
| Home page, HTTP, every minute | The site is down or erroring |
| App or API page, keyword | The page loads but the app behind it is broken |
| Heartbeat from your scheduled jobs | The cron job, queue worker or backup stopped |
| Database or mail port, if public | A service went away |
The Basic plan includes 10 monitors checked as often as every 60 seconds, one status page and every alert channel. That covers most projects with room to spare.
Alerts that respect your evenings
- Send alerts to where you already are: Discord, Slack, Google Chat or email.
- Keep the default confirmation check, so a single dropped request never interrupts dinner.
- Leave repeat reminders off; one alert and one recovery message are enough.
- Add a second channel only for the monitors that matter most, so a broken blog does not ping your phone.
Hosting platforms and scheduled jobs
Free and hobby tiers on hosting platforms often sleep or pause projects, and scheduled functions can stop without notice. A heartbeat from each job is the only way to hear about the second kind. The cron monitoring guide shows the one-line change.
A status page your users can find
Point users at upcertain.com/s/<your-project> when they ask whether it is down. Add the status badge to your README so they see the state before they open an issue.
When it does alert
- Open the incident from the alert. The cause is recorded: a status code, a timeout, a missing keyword or a missed heartbeat.
- Acknowledge it if it will take a while, so the record shows you are on it.
- Check the last deploy or the hosting platform's own status page first; most side-project outages start there.
- When it recovers you get a second message with the total downtime, and the incident closes on its own.
Ask your editor
If you build with Claude Code or Cursor, the MCP server can tell you what is down while you code. MCP is part of the Team plan; on Basic, the REST API gives scripts the same data.