Getting started
Create an account and add your first site — you'll have monitoring running in under two minutes.
1. Create an account
Sign up with your name, email, and a password. Every account starts on a 14-day free trial — no credit card required, and you can invite unlimited team members from day one.
2. Add your first site
From your dashboard, click Add site and fill in:
- Name — a label for the site, e.g.
Production - URL — the full address to check, e.g.
https://example.com - Check interval — how often DownCTL checks the site (as low as 1 minute on every plan)
Save it, and DownCTL starts checking immediately. Within a minute you'll see the first uptime and response-time result on the site's dashboard.
3. What happens automatically
As soon as a site is added, DownCTL also starts running a handful of checks with zero extra setup:
- Response time is captured on every uptime check
- ICMP ping is tried once during setup; it stays enabled when the host responds and turns off when the host does not respond
- SSL certificate status, expiry, hostname coverage, and certificate evidence are tracked daily
- Domain registration expiry is checked daily, with registrar, RDAP status, and nameserver evidence when available
- DNS health — resolution failures, supporting record evidence, and authoritative nameserver responses are caught daily
- IP blacklist status — the site's IP is checked daily against 8 major spam/DNSBL zones (Spamhaus, Barracuda, SpamCop, and others), with zone-level context and delisting links when available
Each of these can back an alert rule — the check itself needs no configuration, only the rule that decides who gets notified.
4. Where to go next
- Set up notification channels so your team hears about downtime immediately
- Turn on a public status page for the site
- Point a custom domain at that status page
- Install the server agent if you also want CPU, memory, disk, and load metrics for the server the site runs on
- Add error tracking to capture application errors, not just downtime
- Add API or port monitors and manage ICMP ping for anything a plain uptime check can't see
- Add cron job monitoring for scheduled jobs and recurring background work
- Invite your team — unlimited members on every plan
Need more capacity?
The trial and every paid plan include the same feature set — status pages, server metrics, and unlimited team members are never gated behind a higher tier. Plans differ only in how many sites and servers are included. See pricing for the full breakdown.