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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

Depending on your plan, Website Checkups supports monitoring for:

  • Websites and APIs – all standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS, HEAD) – available on all plans
  • PING/ICMP and TCP port checks** — available on all plans
  • FTP/SFTP/FTPS servers – connection and authentication checks – from Monitor L
  • Mail servers – availability and DNS blacklist status – from Monitor L
  • UDP port checks – from Monitor L
  • DNS servers – resolution checks and response validation – from Monitor L
  • DNS records – continuous monitoring of A, AAAA, MX, NS, SOA, DNSSEC, TTL records with full change history – from Monitor L

DNS integrity monitoring (labelled “DNS hijacking check” in the platform) continuously tracks your DNS records — including A, AAAA, MX, NS, SOA, DNSSEC, TTL values, TLS fingerprint, GeoIP location, and ASN — and logs every change detected since monitoring began.

Whenever a change is recorded, you receive a notification via your configured channels. The platform keeps a full history of all detected changes, which you can review at any time.

Important: Website Checkups records and reports all DNS changes. The platform does not classify a change as intended or unintended — that assessment is yours to make, based on the notification and the change history.

DNS integrity monitoring is available from Monitor L onwards.

Your DNS records define where all traffic to your domain goes – web visitors, email, and API calls all depend on them. Unexpected changes to DNS records can indicate a hijacking attempt, an error at your registrar or DNS provider, or an accidental misconfiguration.

Because DNS changes can propagate quickly and affect all traffic to your domain, early detection is valuable. Having a timestamped change history also helps with incident investigation and, where relevant, compliance documentation.

Depending on the checkup type, we verify any combination of the following:

– DNS resolution – domain resolves to the expected IP address
– Service availability – server responds within the configured timeout
– HTTP response code – e.g. 200 OK, or a custom expected code
– Content verification – a specified text fragment is present in the response
– SSL/TLS certificate – validity, expiry date, and protocol version (e.g. TLS 1.3)
– Domain expiry – domain registration is not approaching expiry
– Google Web Risk – no malware or phishing flagged for the domain
– Mail server blacklist status – IP not listed on 50+ DNS blacklists (from Monitor L)
– Performance metrics – response time (time to first byte)
– Access credentials – HTTP Basic, Digest, Bearer, NTLM, or FTP/SFTP login (FTP from Monitor L)
– Port connectivity – TCP or UDP port is open and responding (UDP from Monitor L)
– DNS record changes – all changes to monitored records are logged and reported (from Monitor L)

The minimum check interval and available configurations depend on your plan:

  • Free: every 2 hours (up to 2 services, 1 notification contact)
    Configurations: 1 check every 2 hours · 2 checks every 4 hours
  • Monitor XS: every 30 minutes (up to 4 services, 2 contacts)
    Configurations: 1 check every 30 min · 2 checks every hour · 4 checks every 2 hours
  • Monitor S: every 5 minutes (up to 6 services, 3 contacts)
    Configurations: 2 checks every 5 min · 4 checks every 10 min · 6 checks every 15 min
  • Monitor M: every minute (up to 15 services, 5 contacts)
    Configurations: 3 checks/min · 6 checks every 2 min · 9 checks every 3 min · 15 checks every 5 min
  • Monitor L: every minute (up to 30 services, 8 contacts)
    Configurations: 10 checks/min · 20 checks every 2 min · 30 checks every 3 min
  • Monitor XL: every minute (up to 100 services, 15 contacts)
    Configurations: 50 checks/min · 100 checks every 2 min
  • Monitor XXL: every minute (up to 250 services, 25 contacts)
    Configurations: 250 checks/min

You can switch between configurations within your plan at any time, free of charge.

Yes. We support HTTP Basic, Digest, Bearer, and NTLM authentication for web services, as well as login credential verification for FTP, SFTP, and FTPS servers (available from Monitor L).

Notifications

  • Free – Email only
  • Monitor XS – Email, Telegram, Google Chat
  • Monitor S and Monitor M – Email, Slack, Telegram, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams
  • Monitor L, XL, and XXL – Email, Slack, Telegram, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Webhook

Each notification recipient must confirm their subscription and can unsubscribe at any time. Recipients can be configured individually per checkup, up to the contact limit of your plan.

Several situations can explain a missed notification:

  • A cached version of your site was accessed during the checkups (e.g., via Redis, Varnish, or a CDN)
  • 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)

We recommend using Website Checkups as a supplementary monitoring layer. For critical services, combining it with server-side monitoring provides the best coverage.

False positive alerts can occur because of:

  • Server response time exceeding the configured timeout threshold for that checkup
  • A temporary DNS discrepancy or propagation delay
  • Our monitoring server’s IP being blocked by a firewall or rate limiter on your server
  • An SSL certificate issue that browsers bypass silently but our checker flags
  • A brief server overload or network disruption that resolved within seconds
  • A specified content fragment temporarily absent from the page during the check

To reduce false positives, we recommend configuring notifications to trigger only after two or more consecutive failed checks rather than on the very first failure.

  1. Find your Telegram user or group chat ID using the “Get My ID” 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, you will receive a verification message via Telegram, followed by monitoring alerts.

  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, you will receive a verification message in Teams, followed by monitoring alerts.

Further questions? Contact us – we typically reply within one business day.

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