UptimeRobot
Monitor your website like a boss!
About ~10 years ago I was monitoring my website by observing HTTP status code in a Google Drive spreadsheet. That was for free and cool but the Internet changed since then. So I asked Gemini 2.5 for state-of-the-art solutions and it recommended UptimeRobot which is free for personal use. And do you know what? During the registration process UptimeRobot asked how did I found them. And there was an option to select ChatGPT :) It is not the same as Gemini 2.5 Flash, but I selected it as a closest answer.
Today I had to cut electricity in my home for about 10 minutes to hard reset a glitched built-in kitchen device and I just watched my analogue clock to have a feeling about the time.
My website was down for 11 mins.
This free monitoring is next level.
Later I activated caching, so even my website is down, Cloudflare is making sure that something is always online. If not the static cached page, then some Cloudflare message. This caused problems with the monitoring, as it wouldn't work anymore.
The solution was to exclude some page from the Cloudflare cache. In other words, if the server is down, the excluded subpage will be actually down. My choice was the 404.html which is loaded in case of a non-existing URL is opened. Normally users should not see the 404 page, so it is ideal for this purpose.
I created a monitoring dedicated for the 404 page which is no excluded from the Cloudflare cache by cache rules.
For testing purposes I shut down my webserver. After the pre-set waiting time push messages, email alerts, everything arrived (for the Bypass Cache monitoring). Of course I could just pause the monitoring, but this was a good chance to test the app and I love the service!