How we decide when to alert you

WebsitePulse.io does not alert you the moment something looks wrong. Two settings control when and how many times you hear from us during an incident.

Consecutive failed checks

When WebsitePulse.io detects that your site is unavailable, it waits to confirm the problem across multiple checks before sending a notification.

This is deliberate. Brief blips — a server hiccup, a momentary network issue, a slow response that resolves itself — are common and almost never require action. Alerting on every single one would flood your inbox with false alarms and train you to ignore notifications, which defeats the purpose.

By default we wait for 2 consecutive failed checks before alerting you. At 1-minute check intervals that means you will hear from us within 2 minutes of a confirmed outage. At 5-minute intervals, within 10 minutes. You can adjust this in your monitor settings: 1 for maximum sensitivity, 3 if your site is prone to occasional blips.

Alerts per incident

An incident begins when your site goes down and ends when it comes back up. By default, we send one alert when an incident starts and one when it recovers. This is usually all you need — if your site is down, you already know, and a second alert while it is still down rarely helps.

If you'd prefer more contact during a long outage, you can increase this in Account settings under Notification limits. Options are 1, 3, 5, or unlimited. With unlimited selected, we'll re-alert you each time the consecutive failure threshold is met again during the same incident.

Recovery notification

Whenever a monitor that has been down comes back up, you will always receive a recovery notification regardless of your alerts-per-incident setting. Recovery resets the incident counter, so the next outage starts fresh.