A Downdetector alternative that works for your own website

Downdetector shows crowd reports for large consumer brands. If nobody else uses your site, there is nothing to report — so it will never tell you your own site is down.

Why Downdetector cannot see your site

Downdetector infers outages from user reports and social chatter. That signal only exists when thousands of people notice the same failure at the same time. A business site, a client site or an internal app never reaches that threshold, so the page stays empty even while the server is returning 500s.

A direct check does not need a crowd. It requests your URL from outside your network and reports exactly what came back: HTTP status code, TLS certificate validity and expiry, DNS resolution, redirect chain and response time.

What a direct check tells you that crowd reports cannot

• The exact HTTP status code returned (500, 502, 503, 403, 404)
• Whether the TLS certificate is expired, mismatched or untrusted
• Whether DNS still resolves and where it points
• The full redirect chain, including loops
• Response time, so you can tell 'slow' from 'down'

Is it down for everyone or just me?

Run the check from an external network. If the check succeeds and your browser fails, the problem is local — DNS cache, VPN, firewall or ISP routing. If the check fails too, the failure is on the site or its infrastructure, and the status code points at which layer.

Once you know the answer, the useful next step is not checking again by hand. Continuous monitoring re-runs the same check on a schedule and alerts you on the first failure, before customers notice.