Monitoring password protected sites using Oh Dear

Keeping an eye on your site and sending you a notification when it goes down is one of the core features of Oh Dear. Under the hood, we'll send a request to your site and take a look if the response code is in the 200-299 range, which is the default response code range to indicate that everything is ok.

Some of our users are monitoring password protected sites. In such cases, the web server might reply with status code 401 (unauthorised). Sure, extra headers can be specified on Oh Dear to hint to your server it should respond 200 from our particular request, but that's rather cumbersome.

You can now easily monitor password protected sites using our new "Expected response status codes" setting. Using this setting, you can specify which status codes Oh Dear should consider ok.

By default, this setting is set to 2*, which means everything in the 200 range is ok. For a password-protected site, you could set this to 4O1. That's certainly easier than having to add some headers.

A nice side effect of setting the expected response code to 401 is that if you misconfigured your password protection, we have got your back. When making your page accidentally make your page publicly visible, it will probably respond with 200, which isn't expected, and we'll send a notification.

Like you can see in the screenshot above, you can tweak our uptime monitor in various ways. If there is any setting you feel is missing, let us know. We're listening.