Blog
Read about what we've been up to.
Managing monthly reports with the API
On the first of every month we generate an extensive PDF report for every site. This report contains a summary of all check results for the month and is a snapshot available to you and your team via email and the Oh Dear dashboard. We keep the report history so each month can be viewed in a browser…
Here are 10 ways to prevent website downtime
Every minute of website downtime cost large organizations an average of $9,000. That’s half a million dollars every hour, damn. And that’s just the average. If your organization heavily relies on your website to do business, that cost can increase even further. Needless to say, preventing…
You can now log in using passkeys
We’ve added a new option to log in to Oh Dear: passkeys! When logging in using a passkey, you don’t have to type an email or password, and you won’t be redirect to a third party for logging in. It’s also super fast. How to use passkeys at Oh Dear Here’s me logging in to Oh Dear using a…
Targeted snoozes with full history
No one likes to admit it but we all hit snooze on the morning alarm every now and then. The same goes for Oh Dear alerts - sometimes you know that link deep in the docs will get fixed eventually but right now you're busy working on something else. Getting reminded every hour isn’t always helpful.…
How does website monitoring even work?
Every website manager knows that feeling when you look at your inbox only to find a customer notifying you that a core page of your site is down. The worst part of it all, you don’t know how long that page has been down for. If you’ve yet to experience that, count your blessings. Well, unless…
Lifespan of TLS certificates is getting reduced to 47 days
In a pretty significant shift for internet security and subsequently certificate management, the CA/Browser Forum has officially voted to reduce the maximum validity period of TLS certificates to just 47 days by March 15, 2029. This move aims to enhance digital security and trust across the web. But…
Running our test suite in parallel on GitHub actions
A couple of years ago, Laravel introduced a great feature which allows to run PHPUnit / Pest tests in parallel. This results in a big boost in performance. By default, it determines the concurrency level by taking a look at the number of CPU cores your machine has. So, if you're using a modern Mac…
Broken links troubleshooting and a couple of extras
We are excited to announce a powerful new feature in our Broken Links monitor: Troubleshooting. When we can’t crawl all your links, or you see unexpected gaps in the results, it can be tricky to know where to start. Our new Troubleshooting tab is here to help. Quickly identify and resolve crawling…
Why your business can’t afford to skip website monitoring
Why would I monitor my website in the first place? Your website is your business’ storefront, sales team, customer service department, and potentially even your primary revenue channel. Just like you’d protect the physical presence of these aspects of your business with a security system, you…
Here's what worked and what didn't when marketing SaaS like Oh Dear
Where we're at in the scene Oh Dear is the underdog in the website monitoring software space. We’re small fries in a market dominated by big, well-funded competitors. Yet somehow, Freek and Mattias managed to build a solid user base and created a profitable SaaS business. But where do you go from…
Detecting and Resolving Broken Links Using Website Monitoring Software
Broken links are more than minor annoyances—they can significantly harm your website’s user experience, SEO rankings, and overall credibility. Whether managing a small blog or a complex e-commerce platform, ensuring that your site functions flawlessly is essential to keeping visitors engaged and…
Status Page Customizations
Your status page is an important tool for communicating incidents and building trust with your customers. It's also an opportunity to reinforce your brand's identity. That’s why we’re excited to introduce new customization options for your status pages at Oh Dear! What’s New? With our latest…
Enhanced Broken Links Monitoring: Images, CSS and JS
We are excited to announce an enhancement to one of our most unique features at Oh Dear: Broken Links! Broken links monitoring crawls your entire website for internal and external links but we now take this a step further by expanding our monitoring to include CSS, JavaScript, and image links.…
In & outside business hour notifications
Developers, marketing teams and business owners rely on Oh Dear to monitor their entire website and applications. We offer a feature-packed, all-in-one service with simple pricing - designed specifically for your peace of mind. Oh Dear already has a flexible and powerful notification system and to…
New Broken links UI
Keeping your website free of broken links is essential for good user experience and SEO - that's why Oh Dear monitors your entire website! Our broken links crawler will find and test all the links on your site and we keep going until we have checked everything! In addition to alerting you when you…
Tag notifications
At Oh Dear, we’re always looking for ways to make web monitoring easier and more efficient for our users. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Tag Notifications, a new feature that expands our notification options beyond site and team-level notifications. Why? For our larger customers using…
Incident Template Library
We recently announced a new feature to enhance how you communicate with your users during maintenance, incidents, and general service updates. Status Page Templates allows you to save and re-use status updates - but how do you know what incidents might happen or what updates you need to keep users…
New feature: Status Page Update Templates
We know how crucial it is to provide clear and timely communication during incidents or downtime. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Status Page Update Templates - a new feature that makes it even easier to keep your users informed while maintaining a consistent message. Why use a status page…
History Filters
We know that keeping track of downtime and other failures across multiple sites can be a challenge, especially for larger teams. That’s why we’ve added filters to the 'History' page and introduced 'Team History' to make monitoring easier and more efficient! What’s New? Site History Filters…
Update to Microsoft Teams Notifications
Oh Dear offers several ways to keep you updated on important events like downtime, performance and DNS changes, broken links, Lighthouse issues, and more. By default, you will get email notifications to the email address you used to sign up. But you can also choose to receive alerts to your…
Sitemap monitoring is now available at Oh Dear
Oh Dear can perform many checks: uptime, broken links, scheduled jobs, DNS, and much more. We proud to announce that we’ve added a new check: sitemap monitoring. This check will make sure that the structure of your sitemap is correct. We’ll also check if each and every link it links to a page…
Improving our broken link tests
One of the most unique features Oh Dear offers is the broken links and mixed content crawler. We will crawl your site for all links, reporting any broken pages to your defined notification channels. Recently, we encountered degraded performance with our crawler service due to a breaking change in an…
You can now manage notification preferences via our API
Our service can detect various problems with your website: whenever it is down, or a broken link is detected, your cron job isn't running on time, and much much more. Whenever we see a problem we can notify you via email, Slack, webhooks, and various other channels. Up until now, you could configure…
Every second counts in our UI
Downtime has always been shown in minutes, hours, and days but for shorter downtimes you would see "0m" even if the actual downtime was less than a minute. We've updated the UI to show downtime in seconds. This means no more manually calculating brief outages — you’ll see exactly how…
Improving our Multi-Factor Authentication
This week we introduced two new updates to enhance the user/team security administration. These updates focus on improving the Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) setup and visibility for team management. Let’s take a look. 1. View Your MFA Secret Key Previously, users could set up MFA by scanning a…
Reducing PHP's CPU usage by nearly 40% by upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04
Over these past few weeks, we've updated our Ubuntu 20.04 LTS uptime servers to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The reason was mostly just staying up-to-date, but we had a surprising side-effect that was unexpected but very welcome. Measuring reduced CPU usage An easy riddle: can you guess when we were running on…
How to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
We're in the process of upgrading some of our older uptime satellite servers that power our Uptime Monitoring from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This is mostly a smooth process, but in case anyone's ever in a similar position, these are the steps we're taking to complete the upgrades. We should…
Introducing our beautiful status badges
For each site and status page in your account, we now offer badges that you can use to show the status of your site or service everywhere you want. Technically these badges are svg's, so they are very lightweight to embed. The default badge The default badge shows the name of a site and its uptime…
Making sure Laravel's debug mode is always disabled in production
Recently, people started talking about a malware called “Androxgh0st” specifically targeting Laravel apps. In a recent edition of Securing Laravel, Stephen Rees-Carter wrote a good explanation of how it works. The malware targets apps with APP_DEBUG set to true. When enabled, Laravel will give…
Laravel Pulse cards to show response times, scheduled jobs, broken links
Today, we released the ohdearapp/ohdear-pulse package, which contains Laravel Pulse cards to show you the status of your scheduled jobs, any broken links you have in your Laravel app, and uptime / HTTP performance stats. All of these cards use the Oh Dear API to fetch their data. Laravel Pulse is a…
