Frequently Asked Questions


What is is a service for monitoring regularly running tasks such as cron jobs. It uses the Dead man's switch technique: the monitored system must "check in" with at regular, configurable time intervals. As soon as sees a missed check-in, it sends you an alert.

How reliable is

The hosted service currently runs on Hetzner bare metal servers, with healthy excess capacity to handle traffic spikes (which cron jobs with common schedules are prone to create). The app servers are load balanced. The PostgreSQL database has a hot standby as well as daily encrypted backups to S3. The database fail-over is handled manually. The ops team consists of a single person, so multi-hour or even multi-day outages are possible.

Who runs is a product of SIA Monkey See Monkey Do, currently a one-man software and consulting company. The one man is Pēteris Caune, a long time Python developer from Riga, Latvia. Twitter, Github, LinkedIn.

Does offer discounts for open-source projects and nonprofits?

Yes! We offer the Business plan free of charge for open-source projects and nonprofits. Please contact us to get set up.

Do you have a bug bounty program?

We do not have an official bug bounty program but will be very grateful if you report any discovered security issues to

Can I self-host this service?

Yes! The code base is BSD licensed and is developed in the open on GitHub. Self-hosting is a good option if you need to extend the project with proprietary features, if you must run everything in-house for compliance reasons, or if you want to learn about developing and deploying Django web applications. Please note that maintaining a production-grade monitoring service is not a fire-and-forget task, and in many cases the hosted option will be more reliable and cost-effective.


Why am I receiving alerts a few hours before/after the scheduled time?

Look up what timezone your server is using. Make sure that your checks on are configured with the same timezone.

If you have changed the server's timezone recently, but have not restarted the cron daemon afterwards, it might still be using the old timezone. Restart the cron daemon.

Also check if your server's clock shows correct and accurate time.

If a check is down, I want to keep getting notified until it goes back up. Is that possible?

The alerts are "one shot". However, some integrations can be configured to re-send or escalate alerts until you acknowledge them. If you are integrating Healthchecks with an incident management system (PagerDuty, VictorOps, OpsGenie, PagerTree), check the available settings there. If you are using the Pushover integration, you can configure it to use the "Emergency" priority. Pushover emergency notifications are repeated every 5 minutes until they are acknowledged.

Healthchecks also has optional periodic email reminders. In Account SettingsEmail Reports you can choose to receive daily or hourly email reminders as long as any check is down. This works both for the project owner and for the team members invited to a project.

Requests to are intermittently failing with 5xx errors or timeouts. What should I do?

If you notice reliability issues or unexpected HTTP status codes from the ping endpoints, please report the issue to us. Include as much of the below diagnostic information as is feasible:

  • Details about the issue you are seeing: any error messages, how frequently it is happening, whether you can reproduce the issue from different machines
  • Details about the affected host: its IP address, whether it is behind any firewalls, the ISP or cloud provider used
  • The output of curl -vvv {your-ping-url}

Can I change the email address of my account?

Yes, you can change the account owner's email address: go to Account SettingsEmail and Password. Note that the "new" email address must be available (i.e., have no registered account yet).

Can I send notifications to more than one person?

You can add set up multiple email addresses to be receive notifications in the Integrations page. For example, you can add the email address of your ticketing system so a new ticket gets created when a check goes down.

You can also invite your team members to your projects in SettingsTeam Access. In addition to receiving notifications, invited team members will be able to access your account, see the list of checks, inspect ping logs, set up additional notification methods etc. They will not be able to access your account's billing settings.