Website monitoring features, from a single uptime check to a whole user journey
HostTracker is a website monitoring service that has been watching sites on behalf of their owners since 2004. This page is the full map of what it checks: uptime monitoring from 300+ checkpoints worldwide, page speed, multi-step transactions, API responses, SSL and domain expiry, blacklists, malware flags, database queries, and server monitoring for CPU, RAM and disk. Thirteen monitor types, nine alert channels, one monitor list.
What a website monitoring service actually does
A website monitoring service is a set of machines outside your infrastructure that open your site on a schedule, on your behalf, and tell you the moment the answer stops being the one you expect. That is the entire idea. Everything else on this page is a detail about what counts as the answer: a status code, a piece of text on the page, a response time, a JSON field, a certificate expiry date, a CPU reading, or the outcome of a five-step checkout.
The reason it has to run from outside is that the failures you most need to hear about are invisible from inside. A server whose disk is full still reports itself healthy to its own dashboard. A DNS record that points at a decommissioned address resolves perfectly well from the office where the cache is warm. A certificate that expired at 2am breaks every browser on earth while your own load balancer keeps answering. External uptime monitoring is what closes that gap, because it sees exactly what a visitor sees.
The second reason is evidence. When your host tells you the outage lasted four minutes and your customers tell you it lasted an hour, an independent record of every check, from every location, with timestamps, settles the argument. That record is also what a monthly uptime report and a public status page are built from.
Uptime monitoring: is the site up, and does it still work?
Availability is the floor, not the ceiling. A site can answer every request with a perfectly healthy 200 while its login form is broken, its search returns nothing, or its API has started sending an empty array where it used to send your product catalogue. These three checks cover the whole ladder: the server responds, the journey through it completes, and the machine-readable answers behind it are still correct. Hosts that have no website at all - routers, mail servers, devices - get ping monitoring on the same schedule, from the same checkpoints.
Monitor uptime from 300+ worldwide checkpoints
Round-the-clock HTTP/S, ping and port checks run from hundreds of locations at the interval you choose, so you learn whether a site is down everywhere or only from one region.
FunctionalitySimulate multi-step checkout and login flows
Model real user journeys — login, search, checkout — and get alerted the instant a step in the flow breaks or a page stops responding correctly.
FunctionalityValidate API endpoints against their contract
Apply a validation policy to your web service endpoints and catch a wrong status code, a broken JSON/XML response, or a slow reply before your integrations notice.
Speed, server monitoring and the database behind it
Slow is the outage nobody declares. Pages that take eight seconds do not trigger a downtime alert, they just quietly lose the visitors who were not going to wait, and they do it for weeks before anyone notices. These checks watch the three layers where that usually starts: the page as a real browser loads it, the machine serving it, and the database it is waiting on.
Track real page-load speed from 300+ locations
Automate a real browser visit to your page and measure load timing against the policy you set, so slowdowns surface before visitors start bouncing.
PerformanceWatch server CPU, RAM and disk load in real time
Get alerted the moment CPU, RAM, disk, or network connection load on your server crosses the threshold you configure — before it turns into an outage.
PerformanceMonitor database connections and query results
Run periodic connection checks and validate query results across MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and more, so a silent database problem never goes unnoticed.
Certificates, reputation and the things that expire quietly
This group exists because of a specific kind of failure: nothing broke, but the internet stopped trusting you. An expired certificate, a domain nobody renewed, a malware flag from a compromised plugin, or a mail server that landed on a blacklist will each take a perfectly healthy site off the air, and none of them will show up in an availability check that only reads status codes.
Catch SSL and domain expiry before it's too late
Stay ahead of certificate expiration, revocation, chain errors, weak security protocols, and domain expiry dates — all from one monitor.
SecurityDetect malware and phishing flags automatically
Check your site against Google's Web Risk API around the clock and find out the moment it's flagged, before browsers start blocking your visitors.
SecurityCheck and monitor DNS blacklist status
Run a DNS blacklist check and keep monitoring it going forward, so a spam, phishing, or malware flag against your domain never sits there undetected.
How HostTracker decides your site is really down
Any script can email you the first time a request times out. The hard part of running a monitoring service is not noticing failures, it is being right about them, because a service that pages you at 3am for a routing hiccup gets muted within a month, and a muted monitor protects nothing.
So a failed check is never an alert on its own. HostTracker rechecks the site from other checkpoints first. If one location cannot reach your server while the rest can, that is a network problem between that checkpoint and you, and it is recorded as such instead of escalated. You decide how many confirmations a monitor needs before it flips to Down, and you can raise that number for a site behind a flaky network or lower it for one where every second counts.
Planned work gets the same treatment from the other direction: schedule a maintenance window and the monitor keeps checking and keeps recording, but nobody is woken up for a deployment they already knew about. And because every result carries the location it came from, the alert itself is diagnostic. Down from every checkpoint is a server problem. Down from one country is a routing or CDN problem. Slow from three of the twelve you picked is a capacity problem that has not become an outage yet.
Nine alert channels, and rules about who hears what
Detection is only half of a monitoring service; the other half is reaching the right person on a channel they will actually answer. HostTracker sends alerts by email, SMS, voice call, Telegram, Slack, Viber, Discord, web push and webhook, and you can use as many of them at once as you like.
Contacts subscribe per monitor rather than per account, so the developer who owns the checkout flow is not paged about a marketing landing page, and the person who renews domains does not get every HTTP timeout. Channels can be staged: a Telegram message immediately, then a phone call if the site is still down a few minutes later, then an escalation to a second person. Recovery alerts are sent on the same channels, so an incident always closes explicitly instead of trailing off.
Webhooks are there for the cases none of the above cover. They post the incident to whatever you already run, whether that is PagerDuty, an internal chat bot, a ticket queue, or a script that restarts a service and posts back what it did.
Uptime reports, incident history and public status pages
Every check result is kept, which turns a stream of alerts into something you can actually reason about. The dashboard shows the current state of every monitor plus its uptime over any date range you choose; the incident log lists each outage with its start, its duration and the locations that saw it; and scheduled reports can land in an inbox weekly or monthly without anyone logging in, which is usually what an SLA conversation or a client retainer actually needs.
When your users need the same information, publishing it beats answering it forty times. Build a free public status page from the monitors you already run: live uptime percentages, an incident timeline you can annotate as work progresses, and email or RSS updates for anyone who subscribes. It is the same data your dashboard shows, filtered to what you are willing to make public.
Free instant checks and network diagnostics
Not every question needs a monitor. When you just want to know whether a site is reachable right now, or what a DNS record resolves to from three continents, run a one-off check instead. The free instant-check tools cover HTTP, ping, port, traceroute, DNS, blacklist, WHOIS and Web Risk lookups from the same global network the paid monitors use, and the website down checker answers the simplest version of the question with no signup at all. The four guides below explain how to read what each tool gives back.
Ping test
What round-trip time and packet loss actually mean - and why a perfectly healthy server can ignore ping entirely.
Port check
Open, closed, or filtered - what each state says about your firewall, and which ports matter for mail delivery.
Traceroute
How to spot the one hop adding all the latency - and which timed-out hops are cosmetic, not broken.
DNS lookup
Why different locations see different answers, and how TTL decides when your DNS change is truly live everywhere.
Website monitoring from inside your AI assistant
If you already debug with an AI assistant open, the monitoring network can answer it directly. HostTracker's MCP server for AI assistants exposes instant checks over the Model Context Protocol, so Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients can run an HTTP check from Europe and Asia, resolve DNS, look for blacklist listings or trace a route, and read the results back in the same conversation where you are working out what broke.
It uses your own HostTracker API token and the same 300+ checkpoints as everything else on this page. There is no separate dashboard to learn, and nothing to keep in sync, because it is the same service answering.
The same token drives the REST API v2, the official SDKs for TypeScript, Python, Go and .NET and the ht-cli command line client, so monitoring can live in your code, your pipelines and your assistant at once.
What a website monitoring service costs
Every check type on this page is available on every plan. What the plan decides is scale: how many monitors you run and how often they are allowed to check. That is deliberate, because the difference between a personal blog and an online shop is not which features they need, it is how quickly they need to hear about a problem.
The free plan is permanent and monitors two sites every 30 minutes, which is enough to catch an expired certificate or a site that went down overnight. Paid plans start at $5 a month for Personal, $14 for Webmaster and $29 for Business, with an Enterprise tier for larger fleets. New accounts get a 30-day trial with 100 monitors and one-minute checks, with no credit card required, so you can measure a real month of your own uptime before committing to anything.
The honest way to choose is to work backwards from your check interval. If a five-minute outage costs you nothing, monitor every five minutes and pay less. If it costs you orders, monitor every minute and the plan pays for itself the first time it saves you fifty minutes of unnoticed downtime. Compare all monitoring plans and prices.
How HostTracker compares to other monitoring services
Nobody picks a monitoring service in isolation. If this page is open next to UptimeRobot's, Pingdom's or Better Stack's, these guides do the side-by-side for you: what each tool checks, how it alerts, what it costs at a realistic monitor count, and - said plainly - what each of them does better than we do.
The best website monitoring tools in 2026, compared and ranked
Ten monitoring tools scored on check types, minimum check interval, location coverage, alerting reach, free plans and what a realistic 20-monitor setup actually costs.
Head to headHow HostTracker compares to UptimeRobot
Where the free plan's non-commercial terms, five-minute checks and three-month history stop being enough, what UptimeRobot's paid tiers cost, and six alternatives worth pricing before you upgrade.
Head to headHow HostTracker compares to Pingdom
A direct comparison with Pingdom's Starter plan on monitor counts, check types and alert channels, plus six other tools for teams outgrowing its per-monitor pricing.
Head to headHow HostTracker compares to Better Stack
What Better Stack genuinely does best, the three signs you are paying platform prices for a checker, and the alternatives that cover monitoring on its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Website monitoring is an automated check that runs against your site from outside your own infrastructure, on a fixed schedule, and reports back whether the answer it got is the answer you expect. In practice that means far more than pinging a homepage: a monitoring service can confirm that a page loads, that it loads fast enough, that an API returns the right status code and payload, that the SSL certificate is still valid, and that your domain is not sitting on a blacklist. HostTracker runs these checks from 300+ checkpoints worldwide and alerts the people you nominate the moment a result stops matching the rules you set.
For most business sites, every one to five minutes is the right range. A one-minute interval means you hear about an outage within a minute of it starting, which matters when the page in question takes orders. Five minutes is usually plenty for a marketing site or a blog, and it costs less. HostTracker's free plan checks every 30 minutes, which is enough to catch a certificate that expired or a site that has been down all night, but not enough for anything with revenue attached to it. Paid plans go down to one-minute checks, and the interval is set per monitor rather than once for the whole account.
They solve opposite halves of the same problem. Website monitoring is private and diagnostic: it tells you and your team that something broke, where it broke and when, so you can fix it. A status page is public and communicative: it tells your users what you already know, so your support inbox does not fill up with the same question forty times. HostTracker does both from the same data. Your monitors produce the uptime figures and the incident history, and a status page publishes whichever of them you choose, with live uptime percentages and email or RSS updates for anyone who subscribes.
Yes. There are 13 monitor types in total: website HTTP/S availability, ping, TCP port, transaction checks, web content checks, API monitoring, page speed, database checks, server load, Web Risk, blacklist and DNSBL checks, and domain and SSL certificate expiry. They all live on the same monitor list, share the same contacts and alert rules, and report into the same dashboard, so adding an SSL check to a site you already monitor takes seconds instead of a second product, a second invoice and a second login.
Through whichever of nine channels you configure: email, SMS, voice call, Telegram, Slack, Viber, Discord, web push and webhooks. Each contact subscribes only to the monitors that matter to them, so the person who owns the checkout flow is not woken up for a marketing page. You can combine channels and stage them, for example a Telegram message immediately and a phone call if the site is still down a few minutes later. You also get a matching alert when the site comes back, so nobody is left refreshing a dashboard wondering whether it is over.
Before it alerts anyone, HostTracker rechecks a failing site from other checkpoints. If a single location cannot reach your server while the rest can, that is a network problem between that checkpoint and you rather than an outage, and it gets recorded instead of escalated. You control how many confirmations are required before a monitor is declared Down, and you can schedule maintenance windows so planned work never pages anyone. That confirmation step is most of the difference between a monitoring service and a script that emails on the first timeout.
HostTracker has a permanent free plan that monitors two sites every 30 minutes at no cost. Paid plans start at $5 a month for Personal, $14 for Webmaster and $29 for Business, with an Enterprise tier for larger fleets; the plan you pick sets how many monitors you get and how often they are allowed to run. Every new account also gets a 30-day trial with 100 monitors and one-minute checks and no credit card required, which is long enough to measure a real month of your own uptime before you decide anything.
For almost everything, no. Availability, page speed, transaction, API, DNS, SSL, domain, blacklist and Web Risk checks all run from HostTracker's own checkpoints and need nothing more than a public URL or hostname. There are two exceptions: server load monitoring reads CPU, RAM and disk figures from a small collector endpoint you host yourself - HostTracker polls it over HTTP, there is no agent to install - and database monitoring needs a connection your database will accept. Nothing is added to your visitors' browsers, and no change is required to the site's own code.
Yes. Every monitor carries its own list of monitoring locations, drawn from a network of 300+ checkpoints across more than 150 cities. If your audience sits in one region you can weight the checks towards it; if you serve a global audience you can spread them worldwide and see, per location, whether a slowdown is local or universal. Because the location is kept with every result, a report can answer not only whether the site was up, but where it was slow while it was up.
Start monitoring your website in the next five minutes
Every plan includes every monitoring type on this page. Add a check, watch it run from 300+ locations, and decide what fits your site.