Know before your customers do
A check on a schedule, from outside your server, with alerts that are worth reading. Two consecutive failures before we email you, one success to clear it, and when the fault is ours, the email says so instead of sending you to look at your own code.
14 days free. No credit card. No commitment.
Checked from outside
Nothing installed on your site
No renewal trap
Renews at the regular price
99.99%
Uptime, last 12 mo
Daily
Backups kept up to 30 days
210+
Tasks Ellie handles
What it is
A request, from outside, on a schedule
There is not much to it, and that is the point. Most of what makes a monitor useful is decided by what it refuses to tell you about.
Nothing is installed on your site
We request a page the way a visitor would and record what came back. No plugin, no agent, no script tag, and nothing to keep updated. A monitor that needs the site working in order to report that the site is broken is not a monitor.
It runs from our side, not yours
Checks are made from our infrastructure, outside the server your site runs on. If the machine hosting you stops answering, the thing watching it is not on that machine.
You choose what gets watched
Monitoring is opt-in per site, and you pick the path. A lightweight status page is a better probe target than a heavy home page, and if you have one, use it.
Password protection needs no exception
A protected site answers 401, and a 401 is a working server doing exactly what you told it to. We do not bypass the protection and we never hold your credentials.
What you set up, in one screen
Pick a site, pick a path, pick how often. Optionally say whether a 403 or a 404 should count as an outage, and how many consecutive failures you want before we email. That is the whole configuration.
- Opt-in per site
- No plugin
- Any path
- Email or webhook
- On every plan
What counts as down
If the server answered, the server is up
This is the decision that separates a monitor you trust from one you filter into a folder, so it is worth being explicit about.
Down by default
The name does not resolve
DNS returns nothing for the hostname. Visitors get no further than their own resolver, so nothing else about the site matters yet.
The connection is refused, or never answered
The server is unreachable or nothing is listening. This and the timeout are the two failures a visitor experiences as "the site is just hanging".
The certificate cannot be verified
Expired, mismatched, or otherwise untrusted. A browser will refuse to load the page, so we treat it exactly as a browser does.
The server errors
Any 5xx. The request reached your site and your site could not produce the page - a crashed process, an exhausted pool, a fatal error in code.
Up by default
401, 403 and 404
The server answered. It refused, or it had nothing at that path, but it was awake and it made a decision - which is the question uptime asks. You can opt in to treating 403 or 404 as down when a lost document root would be an emergency for you.
429, and it is not even offered
Our own rate limiting and bot protection produce 429s, so alerting on one would mean paging you about your defences working. This is the one code you cannot switch on as a failure, on purpose.
Uptime is not correctness
From check to inbox
Two failures to open, one success to close
The asymmetry is deliberate. Being slow to raise an alarm costs you a minute; being quick to raise a false one costs you every future alert, because you stop reading them.
We request the page
On the interval you chose - every 15 minutes at the entry level, down to every minute on the top plan.
One failure is noted, not announced
It goes into the record immediately. It does not go into your inbox, because a single failed check is almost always a brief network blip somewhere between us and you.
The second failure opens an incident
Two consecutive failures is the floor, and you cannot set it lower. You can raise it to as many as ten if your site is one that flaps under load.
We check whether it is us
Before anything is sent, the whole sweep is classified. If every site on one of our servers is failing at that moment, this is a platform incident and it is worded as one.
You are told once, not once per site
If several of your sites are affected by the same event, that is one email covering them rather than one per site.
One good check ends it
Recovery is deliberately asymmetric. Two failures to open, a single success to close and send the all-clear - there is no upside to being slow with good news.
Why you cannot set it to one
A single failed check is almost always a momentary network problem somewhere between us and your site rather than a real outage. A monitor that emails about those is one you learn to ignore, and an ignored monitor is worse than none - so 2 is a floor rather than a default. Raise it if your site flaps under load; you just cannot go under it.
How fast is fast enough
Your plan sets the shortest interval available to you, from every 15 minutes at the entry level down to every minute at the top. At the fastest setting, two failed checks still means you hear within about two minutes.
When we hold back
Three things we never send as a site alert
Every one of these would be an easy "your site is down" email to send, and sending it would make the other alerts worth less.
It was our server
When every monitored site on one of our machines stops answering at the same moment, that is our problem and the incident says so. You still get told, but you are told what it actually was rather than being sent to look at your own code.
It was inside a maintenance window
An outage that starts inside scheduled maintenance is recorded and labelled, with no alert sent. One that starts outside a window and runs into it still alerts normally - the window is not a mute button for problems that were already happening.
It was probably us being wrong
If a very large share of everything we monitor appears to fail at once, the likeliest explanation is a fault in our own monitoring rather than every customer going down simultaneously. We record it, we alert nobody, and we raise it internally.
None of them are hidden
Where it lands
Your inbox, your endpoint, or the record
Two channels and a history. They are independent, which matters more than it sounds.
Email
One message when a site goes down, one when it comes back, both with what we actually saw. Turn them off in your notification settings if you would rather watch the panel.
Webhooks
site.down and site.up delivered to any endpoint you have configured, signed the same way every other Hostney webhook is. Wire them into Slack, PagerDuty, or whatever already wakes you up.
The history
Every outage, how long it lasted, what we saw, and whether an alert was sent - kept for 90 days. "Why did I not hear about this one" has an answer weeks later.
Turning email off does not silence your webhooks
What it sits next to
Knowing is the first layer, not the only one
A monitor tells you something went wrong. These are the parts that make that rarer, and the part that gets you back.
Bot detection
Most of the load that takes a small site down is not visitors. Scoring and challenging it before it reaches your PHP is what keeps the monitor quiet.
Container isolation
Every account runs in containers with its own CPU, memory and I/O limits, so a neighbour exhausting theirs is their incident rather than a shared afternoon.
Backups and recovery
When the alert is about something worse than a restart, an immutable daily backup on separate infrastructure is what the next hour looks like.
In their words
What people say about hosting with us
“As a non-technical user who has had to stand up many web pages for projects [...] I was very pleasantly surprised with Hostney. The AI assistant Ellie was a tremendous help.”
“Hostney has been a great experience from the start. Anytime something comes up they're on it fast, no waiting around or getting bounced between support reps.”
“Amazing service! Company went above and beyond to help us get set up and functioning.”
“I host multiple websites with Hostney and the ease of management is what does it for me.”
“Hostney feels like the future. The entire process of setting up hosting was seamless, painless and quick.”
“Excellent, reliable service at reasonable prices.”
Pricing
Simple, transparent pricing
Every plan includes managed WordPress, SSH access, daily backups, and enterprise-grade security. Start with a 14-day free trial.
Black Friday30% off up to 3 years with code BLACKFRIDAY30Ends Cyber Monday, November 30
Startup
Great for growing businesses
$7.89
$66.29 a year for up to 3 years, then $94.70/yr
- 1 website
- 10 GB storage
- ~10,000 visits/month: Approximate maximum monthly visits when all hosted sites use our built-in Nginx and Memcached caching
- 5 MySQL databases
- 250,000 inodes: Files, folders, etc.
- 5 FTP users
What's included:
SSL & Domain
- Free SSL certificate
- Free starter domain: A free Hostney address that goes live with your account, so you can build straight away and connect your own domain whenever you are ready
- 2 mailboxes: Shared across every domain on the account rather than counted per domain. Aliases are unlimited and free; a shared mailbox is a real mailbox, so each one uses a slot.
- 3 GB per mailbox: Storage for each mailbox, separate from your account storage.
- Webmail, IMAP and SMTP: Webmail in the browser at mail.hostney.com, plus IMAP and SMTP for Apple Mail, Outlook or any standard mail app. Two-step verification and per-device app passwords are included.
Advanced
For professional websites
$14.97
$125.79 a year for up to 3 years, then $179.70/yr
- 5 websites
- 20 GB storage
- ~110,000 visits/month: Approximate maximum monthly visits when all hosted sites use our built-in Nginx and Memcached caching
- 10 MySQL databases
- 500,000 inodes: Files, folders, etc.
- 10 FTP users
Everything in Startup, plus:
- 5 mailboxes: Shared across every domain on the account rather than counted per domain. Aliases are unlimited and free; a shared mailbox is a real mailbox, so each one uses a slot.
- 5 GB per mailbox: Storage for each mailbox, separate from your account storage.
Backups
- 14 days of backup history: How far back you can restore, download, or browse a backup on this plan. Older snapshots stay stored - upgrading unlocks them.
Performance
- Memcached object cache: In-memory object caching for database queries and sessions, with a cache browser in the panel. Memcached and Redis are the two engines available - an account runs one at a time and can switch between them.
- Redis object cache: Redis object caching with per-key expiry, LRU eviction, and a key browser in the panel. Redis runs instead of Memcached rather than alongside it, so switching engines is one click and the cache rebuilds itself on the next requests.
Pro
Maximum performance and features
$22.89
$192.29 a year for up to 3 years, then $274.70/yr
- 10 websites
- 40 GB storage
- ~200,000 visits/month: Approximate maximum monthly visits when all hosted sites use our built-in Nginx and Memcached caching
- 20 MySQL databases
- 750,000 inodes: Files, folders, etc.
- 20 FTP users
Everything in Advanced, plus:
- 10 mailboxes: Shared across every domain on the account rather than counted per domain. Aliases are unlimited and free; a shared mailbox is a real mailbox, so each one uses a slot.
- 10 GB per mailbox: Storage for each mailbox, separate from your account storage.
Deployment
- 2 SSR applications: Run server-rendered Node.js, Python, or Ruby apps in their own container - Next.js, Nuxt, Django, Rails, and more
Backups
- 30 days of backup history: How far back you can restore, download, or browse a backup on this plan - the full window we keep backups for.
Monitoring
- 1 minute between checks: How often we request the page. Two consecutive failures open an incident and a single success closes it, so you hear within roughly twice this interval.
For new customers on annual plans. Enter the code at checkout, or when you upgrade a free trial before the sale ends. The 30% comes off every year you pay for up front, 1 to 3 years; after that, renewals are at the plan's regular price. Ends 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Monday, November 30.
On every plan
Find out from us, not from a customer
Uptime monitoring is included on every plan, including the trial. Add a site, pick an interval, and get an email that is worth opening.
Questions