How to monitor your website uptime for free

If your site or API goes down at 3am, the worst way to find out is a customer telling you. Uptime monitoring is a service that fetches your URL on a schedule from outside your network and tells you the instant it stops responding.

What actually matters

Check interval. How often the monitor tests your site. Shorter means you learn about outages sooner. A 1-minute interval catches problems roughly five times faster than the 5-minute interval common on free plans.

Where the alert goes. Email alerts get buried and delayed. Alerts to Telegram, Discord, or Slack land where you already are and arrive in seconds. Look for a tool that supports the channel your team lives in.

A public status page. When something breaks, one link that shows current status and uptime history saves you from fielding the same message over and over — and builds trust when you're transparent about incidents.

Recovery notifications. Knowing it went down matters; knowing it came back matters just as much. Good monitors alert on both transitions, not just failures.

Set it up in two minutes with Perch

1. Try a one-off check first — no account needed: run an instant "is my site up?" check.
2. Create a free account and add your URL as a monitor.
3. Add an alert channel: a Telegram bot token + chat id, or a Discord/Slack webhook.
4. Share your public status page link with your users. Done — Perch checks every minute from here on.

Start monitoring free →

FAQ

Is website uptime monitoring free?
Yes. Perch monitors your sites for free with 1-minute checks, chat alerts, and public status pages — no credit card. Free tiers exist because serverless platforms let a monitor run at almost no cost.

How often should I check my site?
For most sites, a 1-minute interval is a good balance: you find out fast without hammering your server. Many free tools only check every 5 minutes, which means an outage can run for minutes before you hear about it.

How do I get a Telegram or Discord alert when my site goes down?
Create a channel (a Telegram bot token + chat id, or a Discord/Slack incoming webhook), attach it to your monitor, and you'll get a message the moment a check fails — and another when it recovers.

What is a status page?
A public page that shows whether your services are up, with recent uptime percentage and response times. It's what you link customers to during an incident so you're not answering the same question ten times.