Website uptime monitoring that pings your phone

How do I get notified when my website goes down?

Add your URL, pick how often to check it, and install Pingwire on your phone as a web app. When a check fails, the alert arrives as a push notification on your lock screen with the status code and how long the site had been up.

There is nothing to install on your server. Pingwire requests your URL from the outside, the same way a visitor would.

How fast will I find out my site is down?

That depends on your check interval. The free tier checks every 5 minutes; Pro checks as often as every 1 minute.

By default Pingwire waits for two failed checks in a row before opening an incident. That means a single blip does not wake you up, and a real outage reaches your phone within roughly two check intervals.

What does Pingwire actually check?

Every check records the HTTP status code, how long the response took, and how many days remain on the SSL certificate. You can require a specific status code or range, and require that a keyword is present in the page body — or that it is absent, which catches error pages that still return 200.

Redirects are followed and each hop is re-validated, so a redirect to an internal or private address is refused rather than followed.

What's the difference between uptime monitoring and a status page?

A status page tells your users what you already know. Uptime monitoring is what tells you in the first place.

Pingwire is the second one. It watches from outside your infrastructure and notifies you; it does not publish a public status page.

Will it wake me up for nothing?

Before every round of checks, Pingwire probes two independent, highly available internet endpoints. If both fail, the problem is on Pingwire's side of the network, so every check in that round is recorded as inconclusive and no incident is opened.

Checks run from a single server, so this is a single vantage point, not a global network of probe locations. The control probe is what keeps a local network blip from being reported to you as your site going down.

People also ask

Can I monitor an API endpoint instead of a web page?

Yes. Any http or https URL works, including JSON APIs and health-check endpoints. You can require a specific status code and check that the response body contains an expected keyword.

Does it check SSL certificate expiry?

Yes. Every HTTPS check records the days remaining on the certificate, and Pingwire opens an incident when the certificate is closer to expiry than the number of days you choose. The default is 14 days.

What happens when my site recovers?

Pingwire sends a recovery push that tells you the site is back up and how long it was down, then closes the incident. You can turn recovery notifications off per monitor.

What you get on each plan

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.