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FAQ

General Questions

Website availability matters to businesses of all sizes – but most smaller organisations lack the internal IT resources to monitor their infrastructure around the clock. Even companies with server-side monitoring in place can miss outages until a customer reports one first.

Website Checkups monitors your websites, APIs, mail servers, DNS infrastructure, and more from external servers, alerting you as soon as something goes wrong. You also get clear reports on availability and performance over any chosen timeframe.

External monitoring – no setup needed

Monitoring runs entirely from our servers. No installation, no on-site infrastructure, no technical configuration. Just register, define your checkups, and we handle the rest.

Wide coverage in one platform

Each checkup can verify uptime, response time, SSL/TLS certificate validity, DNS resolution, DNS record integrity, port availability, domain expiry, Google Web Risk status, and DNS blacklist status for mail servers – all in one place.

DNS record change monitoring

We continuously check your DNS records (A, AAAA, MX, NS, SOA, DNSSEC, TTL and more) and notify you immediately if a change is detected. A full timestamped change history is kept for your review – an increasingly important defence against DNS hijacking attacks. Available from Monitor L.

Transparent reporting

Clear visualisations, historical data, and real-time alerts via your preferred channels – email, Slack, Telegram, Teams, and more.

Free to start, straightforward to scale

Our free plan lets you monitor up to 2 services at no cost, no credit card required. Paid plans start at €9/month with annual billing and scale to meet your infrastructure size.

No pushy marketing – ever

We do not use your contact details for newsletters, sales calls, or promotional messages. You hear from us only about your account and monitoring results.

Website Checkups is backed by elpix GmbH, a German IT company founded in 2003. With over 20 years of experience in web development and infrastructure, this is not a hobby side project – it is a professionally maintained platform with a long-term commitment to development and support.

You can review our full company details on the Imprint page.

Try the free plan for as long as you like. When you’re ready to upgrade, flexible subscription terms are available – monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual. The longer the term, the lower your monthly rate.

Website Checkups is a SaaS platform. All monitoring data, notifications, statistics, and invoicing are processed on our servers in accordance with German and EU data protection law (GDPR).

Your data is exclusively used for:
  • Validation and monitoring of your defined online services
  • Presentation of test results and performance reports
  • Delivering notifications related to your checkups
  • Invoicing and payment processing
  • Account notifications (e.g. warnings about impending inactivity-based deletion)

We never share, sell, or transfer your data to third parties not involved in providing our service, and we never use it for marketing purposes. For full details, see our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.

You control your data. Deleting a checkup in the plugin or platform also removes it from our API. To remove all data, uninstall the WordPress plugin or contact us directly. Invoice data is retained only for as long as legally required.

Yes. As a registered partner or reseller, you earn a commission on every paid invoice from clients you refer – including their future invoices. Commission rates are based on your annual referred turnover:

10% for sales up to €2,000
15% for sales between €2,001 and €10,000
18% for sales between €10,001 and €25,000
20% for sales above €25,000

To register as a partner, please contact us via our contact form.

Subscriptions & Plans

We offer one permanently free plan and seven paid subscription levels:

• Free: up to 2 services, checks every 2 hours, max. 1 contact, email notifications only
• Monitor XS: up to 4 services, checks every 30 minutes, max 2 contacts, from €9/month
• Monitor S: up to 6 services, checks every 5 minutes, max 3 contacts, from €19/month
• Monitor M: up to 15 services, checks every minute, max 5 contacts, from €39/month
• Monitor L: up to 30 services, checks every minute, max 8 contacts, full monitoring capabilities, from €59/month
• Monitor XL: up to 100 services, up to 50 checks/minute, max 15 contacts, from €99/month
• Monitor XXL: up to 250 services, up to 250 checks/minute, max 25 contacts, from €249/month
• Custom: up to 9,999 services, custom frequency and notification channels, price on request

DNS server checks, DNS record change monitoring (DNSHJ), FTP/SFTP/FTPS, mail server monitoring, and UDP port checks are only available from Monitor L onwards.

All prices shown are the lowest monthly cost, achieved with annual billing. See the plan comparison page  for possible notification channel, statistic keeping and further details.

Yes, the free plan is permanently free – no credit card required, no trial period, no hidden costs. Simply register and start monitoring up to 2 services immediately.

The free plan is valid for one year and renews automatically as long as your account remains active. To keep it active, at least one checkup must remain enabled, and you must access your results at least once every three months. You will receive email warnings before any automatic deletion.

The free subscription does not expire on a fixed date. However, it is automatically deleted if your account becomes inactive — specifically, if no login and no active checkup has been recorded for three consecutive months. This applies at any point in time, regardless of how long the account has been open.

Before any deletion, you will receive an email notification giving you the opportunity to reactivate. To avoid the risk of automatic deletion entirely, we recommend upgrading to any paid plan — paid accounts are never deleted due to inactivity as long as payments are current.

No, the number of checkups is flexible within your chosen subscription. You can distribute your monitoring capacity across different intervals and switch between configurations at any time, free of charge.

For example, with the Monitor XS plan (up to 4 services, minimum interval 30 minutes), you can choose:

• 1 checkup every 30 minutes
• 2 checkups every hour
• 4 checkups every 2 hours

Each plan on our plan comparison page lists all available interval options in detail.

All paid plans are available on monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual terms. The longer the term, the lower your effective monthly cost. Example pricing for Monitor XS:

• Monthly: €15/month
• Quarterly: approx. €12/month (€35 per quarter)
• Semi-annual: €10/month (€60 per six months)
• Annual: €9/month (€108 per year)

The same proportional structure applies across all subscription levels.

Paid plans unlock:

  • Higher check frequency – as often as every minute from Monitor M, or every 30 minutes from Monitor XS
  • More monitored services – from 4 (Monitor XS) to 250 (Monitor XXL)
  • Additional notification channels – Slack, Telegram, Teams, Google Chat, Webhook, depending on plan
  • Longer statistics retention – from 3 months (Monitor XS) to 24 months (Monitor XXL)
  • More notification contacts per checkup – from 2 (Monitor XS) to 25 (Monitor XXL)
  • Full monitoring capabilities from Monitor L – FTP/SFTP/FTPS, mail server, UDP port, DNS server checks, and DNS record change monitoring for better DNS hijacking detection
  • Account stability – no inactivity-based deletion risk as long as payments are current

Yes. We send advance email notifications before any deletion or automatic downgrade, giving you time to take action. If you anticipate a payment delay, please contact us at bi*****@**************ps.com before the due date – we are happy to find a solution together.

Billing & Payments

We accept payment by credit card, PayPal, and direct bank transfer. If none of these work for your situation, please contact us at bi*****@**************ps.com – we are happy to find a suitable arrangement.

As a German company, we are legally required to apply VAT to invoices. However, companies based in other EU countries (outside Germany) that provide a valid VAT ID will receive VAT-free invoices under the reverse charge mechanism, whereby the customer declares VAT in their own country.
If you are an EU business and wish to receive VAT-free invoices, please provide your VAT ID during registration.

If an invoice remains unpaid for more than 30 days, your account is automatically downgraded to the free plan. Any checkups exceeding the free plan’s limits will be deactivated until payment is received or a new subscription is activated.

In cases of suspected intentional non-payment, we reserve the right to downgrade the account earlier following a manual review. If you foresee a delay, please get in touch with us before the due date — we are always willing to work something out.

Monitoring & Features

Website Checkups supports monitoring for:

• Websites and APIs – all standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS, HEAD)
• Mail servers – SMTP, POP3, IMAP availability and DNS blacklist status
• FTP/SFTP/FTPS servers – connection and authentication checks
• DNS servers – resolution checks and response validation
• DNS integrity – continuous monitoring of A, AAAA, MX, NS, SOA, DNSSEC, TTL records for unauthorised changes
• Any TCP or UDP port – with PING/ICMP support

Mail, FTP, DNS server, and UDP port monitoring are available from the Monitor L plan and above.

False negatives can happen due to:

  • Server response time exceeding your checkups timeout setting
  • DNS discrepancies (e.g., DNS server issues or outdated entries)
  • Our checkup server’s IP is blocked by your server
  • SSL certificate errors that browsers may bypass without visible warnings
  • Temporary server overloads or network issues
  • Specified content fragments missing from the site during the check

To minimize false negatives, we recommend configuring notifications for at least the second consecutive failed check. Again, our service should complement, not replace, your existing monitoring tools.

  1. Get your user chat ID with “Get My ID” telegram bot – https://telegram.me/get_id_bot
  2. It does not only work for user chat ID, but also for group chat ID. To get group chat ID, first you have to add the bot to the group, then you get user chat ID and group chat ID.
  3. Add with search “Website checkups” bot to your channel
  4. Save your user or group chat ID here in field “Notification value”

After saving your ll get your telegram verification message and later website checkups notifications.

  1. Please create incoming Webhook for your Microsoft Teams channels. More information here.
  2. Save your webhook URL here in field “Notification value”

After saving your ll get your Microsoft Teams verification message and later website checkups notifications.

Notifications

There are several possible reasons:

  • A cached version of your site was accessed during the checkups (e.g., via Redis, Varnish, AWS Frontend)
  • Your service continued running, but a local issue (e.g., internet connection, proxy, DNS) prevented access
  • The outage occurred between our scheduled checks
  • DNS issues affected your server but not the DNS server we used
  • The number of consecutive failed checks you set for notifications wasn’t reached
  • Monitoring might check www.example.com, while api.example.com is down
  • If only parts of your website are down, basic checks might still succeed
  • If your site shows a 200 OK status but serves an error page, monitoring might not detect downtime
  • Notification delivery was delayed (e.g., email issues)

Consider our services a supplementary tool. For critical services, we recommend using additional monitoring tools.

False negatives can happen due to:

  • Server response time exceeding your checkups timeout setting
  • DNS discrepancies (e.g., DNS server issues or outdated entries)
  • Our checkup server’s IP is blocked by your server
  • SSL certificate errors that browsers may bypass without visible warnings
  • Temporary server overloads or network issues
  • Specified content fragments missing from the site during the check

To minimize false negatives, we recommend configuring notifications for at least the second consecutive failed check. Again, our service should complement, not replace, your existing monitoring tools.

  1. Get your user chat ID with “Get My ID” telegram bot – https://telegram.me/get_id_bot
  2. It does not only work for user chat ID, but also for group chat ID. To get group chat ID, first you have to add the bot to the group, then you get user chat ID and group chat ID.
  3. Add with search “Website checkups” bot to your channel
  4. Save your user or group chat ID here in field “Notification value”

After saving your ll get your telegram verification message and later website checkups notifications.

  1. Please create incoming Webhook for your Microsoft Teams channels. More information here.
  2. Save your webhook URL here in field “Notification value”

After saving your ll get your Microsoft Teams verification message and later website checkups notifications.

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