How to monitor a website for free, and what free plans really allow

You can monitor a website without paying, and for a hobby site that is often enough. For client sites the free options have limits that are worth knowing before you depend on them.

What are the free ways to monitor a website?

How does a hosted free plan work?

You add a URL, choose the check, and the service requests it every few minutes and alerts you by email or another channel when it fails. Free plans typically limit the number of monitors and check no faster than every five minutes.

The detail that matters for freelancers is the terms. Some services describe their free plan as intended for hobby or non-profit projects, which may not cover monitoring a client's site as part of paid work. Read the current terms of any service before you build a client service on it.

What about open-source tools you host yourself?

Self-hosted monitors such as Uptime Kuma are free of licence cost and support many check types. The cost is a server to run it on, updates and keeping an eye on the monitor itself.

Run it somewhere other than the sites it watches, otherwise one failure takes down both the site and the alert. A small separate server, or a different provider, solves that.

Can I just write a script?

A short script on a schedule works as a minimal monitor:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
url="https://example.com/"
code=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -m 10 -w "%{http_code}" "$url")
if [ "$code" != "200" ]; then
  echo "DOWN: $url answered $code" | mail -s "Site down" you@example.com
fi

Run it every few minutes from a machine that is not the one hosting the site. Its limits are real: it checks from one place, does not confirm failures before alerting, needs a working mail setup and only reports when it runs. It is a good way to learn how monitoring works and a poor way to look after a client.

Can I use one-off checkers?

Yes, for a quick answer. Our free SSL certificate expiry checker and domain expiry date checker tell you about a certificate or a domain right now. They do not watch anything over time.

What do I give up with free monitoring?

• Speed. A five-minute interval can miss short outages.
• Confirmation. Cheaper setups alert on a single failure, which creates false alarms.
• Coverage. Certificate expiry, domain expiry and key flows are often missing or limited.
• Reporting. Few free options give a clean monthly report for a client.

When is it worth paying?

When a client depends on the site, when you look after more sites than the free limit allows, when you need shorter intervals or status pages, or when a missed outage would cost more than a year of the plan. Our guide to setting up uptime monitoring for client websites covers what to check in a paid tool.

Where Datumboard fits

Datumboard is in early access and its pricing is not final. It shows health next to deploys, renewals, search data and costs for every project. You can join the list below to hear before launch.