Get a push when your traffic flatlines — or spikes
Pingwire counts how many people reach your site each minute. It pushes your phone when that count falls to almost nothing, or jumps far above normal. A drop catches problems an uptime check misses, like a bad deploy or a DNS fault, because your server can still answer every request while nobody is getting through.
Why does my site show up as working but nobody is visiting?
Because "the server responded" and "a person successfully used the site" are different questions, and most monitoring only asks the first one.
A deploy that ships a broken JavaScript bundle still returns 200 for the HTML. A DNS change that points your domain at the wrong place still answers — somewhere. A CDN rule that blocks real visitors will happily serve a monitoring bot. In every one of those cases an uptime check stays green while your actual traffic goes to zero.
Counting arrivals is a second, independent signal. If nobody is arriving, something is broken regardless of what the status code says.
How do I find out my site stopped getting visitors?
Add a traffic monitor and put one line on your pages:
<img src="https://pingwire.dev/t/YOUR-TOKEN.gif" alt="" width="1" height="1" style="position:absolute;left:-9999px">Pingwire counts each request into a one-minute bucket and compares every completed minute against a rolling baseline of recent minutes. When the count falls to a small fraction of that baseline, it pushes your phone with the observed number and the baseline it was measured against.
There is also a server-side version if you would rather count requests in your own code than in the browser.
How do I know if my site is getting unusual traffic?
The same baseline works in the other direction. When a minute's hits reach a multiple of the normal rate — three times by default — Pingwire pushes you with both numbers, so "412 hits versus a baseline of 38" arrives on your lock screen rather than in a dashboard you were not looking at.
The baseline is a median of recent minutes with the highest few excluded, so one earlier spike does not quietly raise the bar and hide the next one.
How do I find out my site went viral?
A spike alert is usually the first thing that tells you. Getting it on your phone within a minute or two is the difference between watching it happen and reading about it afterwards.
It is also how you find out early that something expensive is happening, whether that is genuine attention, a scraper, or an attack.
Does this track my visitors?
No. There are no cookies and no identifiers. Pingwire counts requests, and for the unique-visitor number it hashes the request IP with a salt that changes every day and keeps only that hash — never the address itself.
Those hashes exist only long enough to count how many were distinct in one minute. They are deleted as soon as the minute is evaluated, and a sweeper removes anything older than fifteen minutes if a run is delayed. What remains is a count.
People also ask
Will it alert on a quiet night as if the site were down?
No, for two reasons. The baseline is built from recent minutes, so it follows your normal daily rhythm, and drop alerts only fire when the baseline was high enough to be meaningful in the first place.
How long before drop detection starts working?
A new traffic monitor needs to observe enough complete minutes to build a baseline. Until then it shows "collecting baseline" rather than a green status, and it does not fire drop alerts.
Does the beacon slow my site down?
The browser version is a single 1×1 transparent GIF loaded off-screen, and the response is tiny and never cached. The server-side version is a single request you can fire and forget.
What you get on each plan
Free
- 3 monitors
- Checks every 5 minutes
- 7 days of history
Pro
- 25 monitors
- Checks as often as every 1 minute
- 90 days of history
Billing is paused right now, so every account gets the Pro monitor limits at no cost.
How alerts reach you
Alerts arrive as web push notifications on the devices where you have installed Pingwire, and they also land in your Pingwire chat so there is a record with the numbers in it.
Pingwire does not send SMS, place phone calls, send email alerts, or run on-call rotations and escalation policies. Push and chat are what exists today.
Who builds this
Pingwire is built and run by one developer, and the monitoring described on this page runs on the same infrastructure as the rest of the product. That is worth knowing in both directions: the person who wrote the alerting is the person who answers when it misbehaves, and there is no 24/7 operations team behind it.
Checks run from a single server. Pingwire makes no uptime guarantee about itself, which is exactly why a monitoring tool should never be the only thing you rely on for something critical.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my site show up as working but nobody is visiting?
Because "the server responded" and "a person successfully used the site" are different questions, and most monitoring only asks the first one. A broken JavaScript bundle, a DNS change, or a CDN rule that blocks real visitors can all leave your server answering HTTP 200 while your actual traffic goes to zero.
How do I find out my site stopped getting visitors?
Add a traffic monitor and put a one-line beacon on your pages. Pingwire counts each request into a one-minute bucket and compares every completed minute against a rolling baseline of recent minutes. When the count falls to a small fraction of that baseline, it pushes your phone with the observed number and the baseline it was measured against.
How do I know if my site is getting unusual traffic?
When a minute's hits reach a multiple of the normal rate — three times by default — Pingwire pushes you with both numbers. The baseline is a median of recent minutes with the highest few excluded, so one earlier spike does not quietly raise the bar and hide the next one.
How do I find out my site went viral?
A spike alert is usually the first thing that tells you. Getting it on your phone within a minute or two is the difference between watching it happen and reading about it afterwards.
Does this track my visitors?
No. There are no cookies and no identifiers. Pingwire counts requests, and for the unique-visitor number it hashes the request IP with a salt that changes every day and keeps only that hash, never the address itself. Those hashes are deleted as soon as the minute is evaluated.
Will it alert on a quiet night as if the site were down?
No, for two reasons. The baseline is built from recent minutes, so it follows your normal daily rhythm, and drop alerts only fire when the baseline was high enough to be meaningful in the first place.
How long before drop detection starts working?
A new traffic monitor needs to observe enough complete minutes to build a baseline. Until then it shows "collecting baseline" rather than a green status, and it does not fire drop alerts.
Does the beacon slow my site down?
The browser version is a single 1×1 transparent GIF loaded off-screen, and the response is tiny and never cached. The server-side version is a single request you can fire and forget.
Start monitoring
Create an account, add your first monitor, and install Pingwire on your phone to receive the alerts.