Free Website Monitoring

"Website monitoring" is more than an uptime ping

A bare uptime ping — does the homepage return a 200 — is the minimum, not the whole picture. Real website monitoring layers on TLS certificate expiry, domain expiry, DNS resolution, and ideally response content, because most outages trace back to one of those rather than the server simply falling over.

A free plan that only offers a ping is monitoring a fraction of what can actually break. A handful of monitors is enough headroom to check several of these signals at once on one site, instead of settling for a single homepage ping and hoping nothing else fails.

What Holter's free plan includes

The concrete claim: 5 monitors, checks every 5 minutes, no credit card to start or to keep using it. Spent well, that's the site's main URL, its TLS certificate, its domain-registration expiry, and DNS resolution — four checks that together catch most real-world causes of downtime — with one monitor left over for whichever other endpoint matters most, like an API health check or a login page.

That's a real, working setup for one site, not a token gesture. It's a specific limit, though: if you run more than one site, or want checkout, login, and an API each watched on their own instead of sharing that one spare slot, 5 monitors will feel tight quickly — which is exactly what paid tiers exist to raise.

What a free plan honestly can't promise

No free plan — Holter's included — instantly detects every possible failure or guarantees zero false positives. Monitoring reduces how long a problem goes unnoticed; it doesn't make problems impossible. Claims like "instant" or "guaranteed" detection are marketing, not how outside-in checks actually work: there's always a check interval, and a real outage is caught somewhere within that window, not the instant it happens.

Similarly, "free" isn't a synonym for "unlimited." Five monitors is a real, useful number for a single site — but it's a specific limit, not an open-ended allowance, and it's worth knowing that going in rather than being surprised by it later.

Getting the most out of a free plan

Spend the monitor budget on what actually breaks silently: the homepage or main app URL, the TLS certificate, the domain registration, and DNS — in that order of priority if you have to choose. That combination, checked every 5 minutes, catches the majority of real incidents on a single site without needing anything beyond the free tier.

If a fifth monitor is available after those four, put it on the next most customer-facing path — a login page or checkout flow is usually a better use of it than a second internal or low-traffic endpoint, since that's the path a real customer would hit and notice first.

When free website monitoring stops being enough

A single site with the four core checks plus one extra covers the highest-value 80% of what silently breaks. The honest signal that you've outgrown a free plan isn't a specific day — it's wanting to watch more than one site, wanting each customer path monitored on its own rather than sharing a slot, or wanting a faster check interval than 5 minutes for something where every minute of downtime has a real cost. None of those are failures of the free plan; they're just past the line it was built to cover.

Free monitoring vs. building it yourself

It's possible to hand-roll basic monitoring with a cron job and a curl command hitting your own site — but that script runs on infrastructure that can fail alongside the thing it's checking, and it stops silently the moment the server running it goes down, which is exactly the scenario it was supposed to catch. A free plan running on infrastructure separate from your own is what actually delivers the "outside-in" part of website monitoring, which a self-hosted script on the same box can't.