Help

How often is my site checked when it goes down?

No matter what account type you have we will always check your site every minute when we know your site is down. Apart from being able to alert you within 59 seconds of when your site comes back up, it allows us to make your downtime statistics more accurate.

Whats all this about "basic authentication"?

If you have a server that required basic HTTP authentication then this allows you to enter in the credentials to allow you into the site. The username and password are encrypted in our database but being basic HTTP authentication it means the username and password are sent as plain text (unless your using SSL), but you knew that right?

Warning: This does not mean you can put your Facebook username and password in! Its not that type of authentication

What's all this about "keywords"?

In the keywords field you can enter a sentence that you would expect to find on the page being checked. For instance if I was checking HootMonitor.com I would enter the keywords "What is HootMonitor?" because I know that that appears on that page. When your site is checked we will scan the page for the sentence you enter and let you know if it doesnt appear.

But what does that actually mean to me? It can be used to tell if there is a problem with the server displaying the wrong page but telling us that it is still up. Or in the worst case scenario it can tell you if someone has squatted your domain or hacked your DNS etc.

What is the "User Agent" for?

When HootMonitor checks your site it will by default show up as a bot with the user-agent "HootMonitor/0.1" and some hosting providers might pick this up as a Denial Of Service attack as it will be checking your site reguraly. So with the premium account we give you the option of making the check appear as if it is from one of the top 4 web browsers. This will help the site checker being blocked and telling you your site is down.

Why do you need my phone number?

We only need your phone number if you have a premium account and want to receive SMS messages. You will obviously need some SMS credits to do that.

What are SMS credits?

You need SMS credits to be able to receive text messages (if you have access to a premium account). One credit is equivilant to one SMS. Each time an SMS is sent your credits remaining will go down by one. When your credits have run out we won't be able to send you SMS's when your site goes down or comes back up again.

Why are some of my sites disabled?

The simple reason for this is that you had a premium account and it expired. The basic account only allows 3, if you have any more in your account then you won't be able to access them and we won't be collecting checking sites or collecting statistics.

What happens when HootMonitor goes down?

Our hosting provider (which we highly recommend!), Linode, strive to keep their servers with as high an uptime as posible and they do this very very well. But if their system does go down then the statistics gathering and checking will pause for the duration of the down time. Any up/downtime calculations will exclude the time when the service is down. The website will also be unavailable for the duration. Please read our Terms of Service for more information.

HootMonitor is not a replacement for services like Pingdom, we support a different area of the market. Pingdom do an awesome service (at a much higher cost) but you get what you pay for.

Do you see/keep my username and passwords?

We do not see your Twitter or Facebook login details. From both sites we get an ID which is your unique identifier with that service. With Twitter we also receive 2 codes which allow us to set up Direct Messages, which we use so your account can follow the @HootMonitor account. This is because Direct Messages require a mutual friendship.

Does a check register a pageview on my site?

If you use Google Analytics then no it shouldn't register as this is client-side analytics. If have server-side analytics then it will get picked up. You can do a search and find the word HootMonitor in the user-agent header if you want to filter it out.

What do you class as a timeout?

We set our own limit for requests. This is so that the server doesn't sit there waiting endlessely for a response. We currently have the limit at 10 seconds. A site really should respond by that time.