We watch the hosts while you watch the sites.
Uptime checks, certificate expiry, escalation policies, and public status pages for $1 a month per domain, managed from your own dashboard. Add as many sites and paths under a domain as you like, set who gets told when one stops answering and who hears next, and publish a status page your customers can check.
Monitored Sites
3 monitoredWhat gets watched
Adding a site turns on the checks below. A domain costs $1 a month, and every subdomain and path under it is covered by that one charge.
Uptime checks
An uptime check asks your site whether it is answering and records what came back. When the answer stops arriving, the monitor opens an incident and your escalation policy starts telling people about it. That is the whole mechanism, and its value is that you find out from us rather than from a customer who gave up and emailed you. api.example.com, www.example.com, and example.com/health all count as one domain.
Certificate expiry
A certificate that quietly reaches its expiry date takes a site down as completely as a dead host, and it does it on a schedule anyone could have seen coming months in advance. It is the most avoidable outage there is and it still happens constantly, usually on a subdomain nobody remembered was sitting on its own certificate. SSL monitoring covers expiry on the sites you add, so the certificate becomes something you get told about instead of something you learn from a browser warning screenshot.
Escalation policies
An alert nobody reads is the same as no alert. A policy lists who hears first, then who hears five minutes or an hour later if nobody has acknowledged the incident, by team member, email address, or webhook. Each domain follows your default policy or one of its own, and everyone who was paged hears when the site comes back.
Separate controls for separate jobs
Monitoring is not one switch. Viewing the dashboard, adding a site, changing the settings on a site already there, removing one, managing escalation policies, acknowledging incidents, and publishing status pages are separate permissions, and they can sit with different people.
That split does more work than it sounds like it does. The person who knows which hostnames deserve a check is often not the person who should be able to switch a check off. The list of people who need to hear about a failing checkout page is rarely the same list as the people who administer it. Keeping removal apart from creation means someone can extend your coverage without also being able to quietly delete it.
Changes are recorded. Human actions, security events, and errors are logged, so who removed a monitor last Thursday is a lookup rather than a conversation.
- Add a site to monitoring without holding the right to remove one
- Manage monitoring settings without owning the escalation policies
- Let the on-call engineer acknowledge an incident without editing anything else
- Read the dashboard without the ability to change anything on it
- ViewSee the monitoring dashboard and the current status of every site under it
- AddPut a new site under monitoring
- ConfigureChange monitoring settings on the sites already there
- RemoveTake a site out of monitoring
- NotifyBuild the escalation policies that decide who is told about an incident, and in what order
- AcknowledgeTake an open incident, which stops its escalation
- PublishCreate and edit public status pages
About our 99.5% commitment
An availability figure is the cheapest thing on a hosting page to print, so here is the reasoning behind ours instead of only the number.
Our uptime commitment on cloud and dedicated services is 99.5%, backed by active monitoring on each host. We publish a floor we intend to hold on hardware we own, in buildings we can walk into, rather than the highest number the industry would let us print.
A committed floor you can verify is worth more than a higher number you have to trust. Decimal places cost nothing to add. The questions that decide your availability are who owns the machine, who can physically reach it, and what happens in the hour after it stops responding.
Then there is the remedy. An availability guarantee is generally settled in service credits, and a credit is calculated against what you paid for the service, not against what the downtime cost your business. A larger credit on a smaller base is a different promise from keeping your site up, which is why the clause is worth reading before you compare two figures on two marketing pages.
So the number stays where we can hold it, and we would rather spend the conversation on how we hold it than on how it compares.
Who responds when a check fails
Our facilities are in Des Moines, Iowa, a production site with a recovery site behind it. Both have redundant power and cooling, and the racks are monitored around the clock.
Physical access is by Carpathian's own staff. When a machine needs hands on it, the hands belong to someone who works here and has seen your cabinet, not to a contractor dispatched into a building they have never been inside. That is the half of an availability commitment no contract language can supply.
The redundancy between the two sites is site redundancy, not geographic. Both buildings are in the same metro, and we say so plainly because it changes what you should plan for.
If you want to know how coverage works outside business hours, ask us and you will get a specific answer about who is reachable and how. We would rather tell you exactly that than imply a room full of people watching screens at three in the morning.
- Two facilities in Des Moines, Iowa, both operated by us
- Redundant power and cooling in each
- Physical access by Carpathian staff
- Site redundancy between the two, never described as geographic
Questions we get asked
What is included with monitoring?
Who can add or remove a monitored site?
Who receives the alerts?
Does monitoring watch certificate expiry?
What does the 99.5% uptime SLA cover?
Why commit to 99.5% rather than a higher number?
Who responds when something breaks?
Is there a record of changes to monitoring?
The rest of what sits under these checks
Monitoring watches what runs on our hardware. The virtual machines themselves, the backups that make a bad day recoverable, and the buildings the racks sit in each have a page of their own.
Add a monitor before you need one.
Uptime checks, certificate expiry, escalation policies, and status pages for $1 a month per domain. Add a site from your dashboard, put the right people on your escalation policy, and the first time you hear about an outage it will be from us. If you would rather talk through how the 99.5% commitment and the response behind it apply to your setup, the person on the other end runs the hardware.