Uptime monitoring or the Down Checker?
One watches your own sites around the clock. The other answers one question, now, about any site: is it down, and why?
Side by side.
| What is compared | Uptime monitoring | Down Checker |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A monitor that checks your sites around the clock | One check of any public site, when you ask |
| Which sites | Sites you have verified you own | Any public website |
| Account | A free account, and one DNS record per site | None |
| How often | Every 5 minutes; as often as every minute on Pro and Business | When you press Check |
| What it tells you | When a site goes down, and when it comes back | Up, gated or down, and which step failed: DNS, the connection, TLS or the server |
| Checks from | Cloudflare's network | AWS US East, and Ireland and Mumbai as well when you ask for every region |
| Alerts | Email and webhook, on each change of status | None. "Watch this site" adds the site to monitoring |
| Limits | 10 sites on Free, 25 on Pro, 100 on Business | 60 checks an hour per address |
Which one?
Choose uptime monitoring when
- It is your site, and you want to hear first when it fails.
- You want a record of when it was down.
- You want alerts in a chat tool or a pager.
Choose the Down Checker when
- A site will not load and you want to know whether it is you or them.
- It is someone else's site.
- You want to know which step failed, right now.
They work together: the Down Checker says what is wrong now, and monitoring tells you the moment it goes wrong again.
More comparisons.
Load test or cloud load test?Stress test or cloud stress test?Security scan or deep TLS analysis?Security Headers Checker or security scanning?SSL Certificate Checker or deep TLS analysis?One account, or separate tools?BCDRPulse or a dedicated uptime monitor?BCDRPulse or a dedicated load-testing service?BCDRPulse or a dedicated vulnerability scanner?Continuous resilience or a chaos engineering platform?
Start with your own sites.
Monitoring is free for 10 sites. Add the tests when you need them.