How we decide when to alert you

WebsitePulse.io does not alert you the moment something looks wrong. Each check is called a pulse, and you can choose how many consecutive failed pulses trigger a notification.

Alert sensitivity

When WebsitePulse.io detects that your site is unavailable, it waits to confirm the problem across multiple pulses 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.

You can set your alert sensitivity in Monitor settings under Alert sensitivity. Choose from 1 to 5 pulses:

1 pulse: alert on the first failed check (most sensitive)
2 pulses: alert after 2 consecutive failures (recommended)
3 to 5 pulses: useful for sites with occasional blips

The settings panel shows you exactly what your chosen number of pulses means in real time, including how long that delay is on your current plan.

Alert sensitivity dropdown showing 1 to 5 pulse options

On the free plan, pulses run every 5 minutes. Two pulses means you'll be alerted after around 10 minutes of confirmed downtime. On paid plans, pulses run every minute, so the same 2-pulse setting alerts you within 2 minutes.

Monitor settings modal showing Alert sensitivity and What triggers an alert sections

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 pulse threshold is met again during the same incident.

The default of 1 alert per incident keeps your inbox clean. Most outages resolve within minutes, and the recovery notification is all the confirmation you need.

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.

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