Downdetector alternative for your own website
Downdetector works by counting user reports, so it only ever covers services big enough to have a crowd complaining. Your website almost certainly is not one of them. The alternative that actually answers “is my site down?” is a direct check: request the URL from outside your network and read the status code, certificate and DNS answer. That is what the checker below does, in about five seconds.
Check any domain right now
Runs a live request from our servers and reports status, response time, TLS and DNS.
Downdetector vs a direct uptime check
| What you need | Downdetector | Direct check |
|---|---|---|
| Tells you if a big consumer service is down Downdetector is built on user reports for well-known brands. That is what it is best at. | ||
| Tells you if your own website is down Report-based sites need a crowd. Your site does not have one, so it will never show up there. | ||
| Works the moment there is a problem Reports lag the outage by minutes. A direct HTTP check does not wait for anyone to complain. | ||
| Says why the site is failing You get the status code, TLS state, DNS answer and response time, not a spike graph. | ||
| Alerts you before customers notice Checks run on a schedule and notify by email, Slack, Google Chat, Teams, webhook or SMS. | ||
| Public status page you control Publish a branded status page instead of pointing customers at a third-party report feed. |
When Downdetector is still the right tool
If Gmail, Slack, Cloudflare or your bank stops working, crowd reports are genuinely useful — thousands of people notice within a minute and the graph spikes before any provider posts an update. Use it for that.
It stops being useful the moment the question is about a site only you and your customers visit. There is no crowd, so there is no data, and a flat graph gets read as “fine” when the site is offline.
Common questions
What is the best Downdetector alternative?
It depends which job you need done. To see whether a large consumer service is having problems, IsItDownRightNow and Downforeveryoneorjustme do the same crowd-report job. To check or monitor your own website, use a direct monitoring tool like Lemwatch, which requests your URL from outside your network and tells you the exact failure, not a report count.
Is Downdetector accurate?
For major brands it is directionally accurate, because thousands of people report at once. For everything else it is not: with no reports there is no signal, so a site can be completely offline and show a flat graph. It measures complaints, not availability.
Why does Downdetector not show my website?
Downdetector only tracks services people search for and report on. Small business sites, client sites and internal apps never reach that threshold. A direct uptime check is the only way to know their real status.
Is there a free Downdetector alternative for my own site?
Yes. You can run a free one-off check on any domain here, no account needed, and see status code, response time, TLS validity and DNS resolution. Continuous monitoring with alerts is available on the free plan too.
How do I check if a website is down for everyone or just me?
Run the check from a server outside your own network. If an external check reaches the site and you cannot, the fault is local: your DNS resolver, browser cache, VPN or ISP. If the external check fails too, the site itself is down.