Pingvella is built to do one job well: tell you quickly when something that should be working has stopped. This guide follows a single website check from the moment you add it to the day it recovers from an outage.
1. You add an address
Give Pingvella the address of your website, an API or a health page, and pick where alerts should go. There is nothing to install and no script to write. If you don’t have a health page, you can download a ready-made one and upload it to your site.
2. Pingvella checks it every 5 minutes
From then on, Pingvella requests the address every five minutes and judges the response. The site counts as healthy when it returns a successful 2xx response, after following any redirects.
Each request also records how long the site took to answer. Over days and weeks, that builds a picture of whether the site is holding steady or slowly getting slower.
3. Problems are confirmed before you hear about them
The internet is not perfectly reliable, and a single dropped connection does not mean your site is down. When a request fails, Pingvella tries once more straight away. Only if the second attempt fails too is the site treated as down.
These all count as down:
- A server error or any other non-2xx response
- A timeout
- A refused or dropped connection
- An expired or invalid SSL certificate
- An address that no longer resolves
4. You are alerted
The moment a check goes down, an incident opens and the start time is recorded. Alerts go to the destinations you chose: email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram or a webhook. If you have your dashboard open, it also raises an alert on screen.
The free plan includes one type of alert destination. Paid plans include every type, so a problem can reach your team chat and your phone.
5. Recovery is announced too
When a later request succeeds, the incident is resolved on its own and a recovery notice is sent. You do not have to go back and check, and you know the fix worked. The incident stays on record with its start and end, so the uptime chart and incident list always show how long you were affected.
Beyond websites
Pingvella also watches the work that cannot be asked about from outside. Heartbeat monitoring lets cron jobs, backups and scheduled tasks report in, and raises an alert if they go quiet. Both kinds of check sit in one dashboard, with the same alerts and the same history.
Built for more than one person
If you look after sites for clients or work in a team, you can share a check with view or admin access, or hand it over to somebody else. You stay in control of who can see and change what.
Safe by design
Because Pingvella makes the request on your behalf, it only requests public web addresses. Addresses that point at private networks, loopback addresses and cloud internal services are refused, redirects are checked at every step, and credentials in a URL are not accepted. It cannot be used to probe anyone’s internal systems.
What it costs
Every account can have five website checks, including the free one. The free Starter plan also includes three cron or heartbeat checks, and paid plans add more checks and every type of alert destination. The pricing page has the details, and you can cancel any time.
Common questions
Can Pingvella tell me if my website is down?
Yes. Add a website check with the address of your site or health page and Pingvella requests it every 5 minutes. A non-2xx response, a timeout or a connection or certificate error marks it down and sends your alerts, with a recovery notice when it is back. Every account can have five website checks. For sites that are not reachable from the internet, run the request from your own scheduler and check in only when it succeeds.
How often is my website checked?
Every 5 minutes. If a request fails it is tried once more straight away, so a single dropped connection doesn’t raise a false alarm.
What counts as my website being down?
Anything other than a successful 2xx response once redirects are followed: an error page, a timeout, a refused or dropped connection, an expired or invalid SSL certificate, or an address that no longer resolves.
There are more answers on the FAQ page.