You can check the real-time status of a domain with no registration needed, but you won’t receive alerts until you sign up (we need to know what email address to send the alerts to). For example, here’s the current status of www.office.com. You don’t need to own the websites that you monitor. If you want to be informed when the Steam Store goes down, just monitor store.steampowered.com! Register now to receive alerts about the services that you care about.
We are aware that there are plenty of other uptime monitoring services, and this isn’t a new problem. However, there were a few important things missing from those services, starting with the fact that they didn’t let us know in a timely manner when sites go down. Without naming names, many took up to 15 minutes to send us an alert. An uptime monitor isn’t very useful if it doesn’t let you know about downtime. They didn’t let us try their service or see what requests would be made until after account registration. They also didn’t provide sufficient detail about what exactly was down (http, https, ping). Finally, and probably most importantly: they didn’t tell us what a user who attempted to visit the site would actually SEE in a browser. This, to us, is crucial. If there’s a 5xx error, we want to know what the user sees.
We’ve discovered through development that most services can’t actually offer screenshots at their price point. Browsers are large pieces of software to run, with CPU and RAM requirements that are hundreds of times higher than the uptime monitoring code itself. That means that these services will NEVER offer screenshots; their hosting costs would be too high, and they wouldn’t make money. So using existing services is out; it’s not something they will fix later, unless they start charging a lot more.
We made ruup.site for ourselves because we need it, but we are offering it to the public because we think maybe we’re not the only people who care about what a user sees when a website goes down.
We’re a small company and we care about the quality and reliability of our code, so for this project we didn’t use LLMs at all. That means that other monitoring sites will probably have more graphs in their UI and integrate with more communication channels. We’re open to doing more development if people are using this software, and we certainly love to fulfill the needs of our customers. However, unlike others we’re not going to add things just for the sake of having more features on a checklist somewhere. We believe that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
There are technical details available at https://ruup.site/#section-about. This lists monitoring frequency (every 5 minutes) and a description of all the email notifications the service may send.
You might think that your website doesn’t go offline, but have you checked? You would be surprised at how frequently some major websites go down.
Here are just a few of the dozen or so 500 error screenshots we’ve taken over the last 30 days.
Have fun playing with ruup.site and let us know if you have any questions or run into any problems; we’re here to help! Monitoring for up to 5 domains is completely free and does not require a credit card, so you have nothing to lose by trying it out!
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