This page takes you from nothing to a monitored website. Plan on five minutes. You do not need a card, and you do not install anything on your site.
1. Create your account
Open the sign-up page and fill in your name, your email address, and a password. The password needs at least 8 characters, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letters, and a digit. Tick the box to accept the terms and pass the short check that you are not a robot, then submit the form.
Every new account starts on the Free plan. Free is a plan, not a trial: it does not run out. It covers one website with all four checks.
You are signed in right away, and UptimeWire sends a confirmation letter to your address.
2. Confirm your email address
Until you confirm, the cabinet shows a banner: "Please confirm your email address: we sent a link to your address. Monitoring starts after that." Open the letter and press the link. The link works for 24 hours.
If the letter does not arrive, check your spam folder, then press "Send again" in the banner. The number of letters per hour is limited, so wait a little between attempts.
Until the address is confirmed you cannot add a website, test an address, create a status page, or change your plan.
3. Add your first website
Press "Add website". The cabinet leads you through three steps: the website, the checks, and the alerts.
- Website address. Enter the full address of a public page, for example
https://www.example.com/. If you leave out the scheme,httpsis assumed. UptimeWire requests the address from the outside, so it cannot sign in or open a page that needs a login. - Name. Any label that helps you recognise the website in lists and alerts.
- Alert email. The address that receives alerts for this website. It starts as your own address. If you enter a different one, that address has to be confirmed by a link first, and alerts keep going to the old address until then.
- Interval. How often the website is checked. The form offers 1, 3, 5, 15, or 30 minutes, or 1, 6, 12, or 24 hours. Your plan sets the shortest interval you can pick, and shorter intervals are not shown. A shorter interval means you hear about a problem sooner.
The form also has optional settings: a client name (for agencies), how early to warn about an SSL certificate or a domain that is about to expire, a page-text rule, and which answers count as working. You can leave them as they are and change them later.
Before you save, you can press the button that tests the address. It shows what UptimeWire sees at that address right now. If the test fails, correct the address before you start.
Press the final button to start monitoring. The first check begins when you finish.
What "four checks" means
All four checks come with every website, on every plan, and you do not configure them one by one.
| Check | What it looks at | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Whether the address answers, and how fast | At the interval you chose |
| SSL certificate | Whether the certificate is valid and when it expires. Only addresses that start with https:// have one |
Every 6 hours |
| Domain | When the domain registration expires | Once a day |
| DNS | Whether the domain name still resolves to an address | Every hour |
4. Read the status
Your website appears in the list with a status.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| First check pending | The website has been added and has not been checked yet. The first result usually takes a few minutes. |
| Up | The latest checks succeeded. |
| Checking | A check has failed, and UptimeWire is checking again before it calls this an outage. No alert has been sent yet. |
| Down | An incident is open. The failure was confirmed. |
| Planned work | A maintenance window you set is running now. |
| Paused | Monitoring of this website is switched off. |
A website can show "Checking" for a short while without being down. Read How to Read an Incident for what happens next.
5. Check that an alert reaches you
Open "Alerts" in the menu. The page is called "Notifications". Under "Where alerts go", the Email row has a button that sends a test letter to your alert address. Press it and look for the letter. If it is in your spam folder, mark it as not spam. The number of test letters per hour is limited.
A test you send shows up under the latest alerts, so you can see what was sent.
To receive alerts somewhere other than email, see Connect Notification Channels.
Quick checklist
- The account exists and the email address is confirmed.
- The website shows "Up" after the first check.
- A test letter arrived, and you know where.
- You know which person or chat receives alerts at night.
The cabinet also keeps a short "Set up your monitoring" checklist on the dashboard for the first weeks. It walks through the same ground: add a website, get the first check, try an alert, connect a second channel, and create a status page.
If something does not work, see Contact Support.