Oh Dear becomes the preferred website monitoring tool for Dutch education and research institutions
Published on June 23, 2025 by Laurens Goethals
SURF is a Duth IT cooperative in service of educational and research institutions. In essence, they help out these organizations by vetting and building software and other tools that best suit their needs. For years they offered a website monitoring service of their own, SURFopzichter, to affiliated institutions. As of February 1, 2025, the application has been sunset. Since there are plenty more modern alternatives on the market that offer the same services, SURF now refers its members to Oh Dear, among others, as a user-friendly and comprehensive solution for website monitoring. Affiliated universities, colleges, and research institutions can now enjoy all-in-one monitoring with the help of a Belgium-made tool, awesome!
For context, SURF's primary goal is to strengthen the Dutch education and research sector by collaborating on digital services, innovation, and knowledge sharing in ICT. In practice, they are a member organization that provides solutions, knowledge, and expertise in areas such as security, public values, access management, storage, and connectivity. For its members, SURF functions as an association, service provider, and innovation hub, negotiating contracts with suppliers on behalf of its members. Basically, the aim is to provide members with good deals and proper expertise under clear conditions—both in line with (inter)national laws and regulations and shared public values.
“The fact that a large-scale member organization like SURF now offers Oh Dear to its members is a very nice confirmation for us that we have been able to build a reliable and quality product,” says our co-founder Mattias. “Even though we're small potatoes, we're proud that with Oh Dear, we're supporting the educational landscape and digital learning environments in the Netherlands.”
More than 100 institutions are affiliated with the SURF cooperative, including all Dutch universities, colleges, medical centers, vocational schools (MBO), as well as research institutions like the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Royal Library (KB).
“I also love how conscious and diligent people have become when they're looking for a specific tool,” adds our other co-founder, Freek. “The biggest ballers are not always first-choice anymore. Some people even deliberately avoid the large tech companies from the US and instead opt for a fully EU-based solution. Buy local, as they say!”
Speaking of being EU-based, Oh Dear was recently recommended on European Alternatives, a database of alternative solutions to well-known software and tools. This didn't happen overnight, as Oh Dear underwent a pretty thorough assessment in terms of privacy and security.
With SURF’s trust, our boys Freek and Mattias are optimistic about the future. “Partnerships like these give Oh Dear a lot of credibility and confirm that we certainly don’t have to fall short compared to our biggest competitors,” they say.
If, by some miracle, you landed on this page without any context whatsoever, Oh Dear is an all-in-one website monitoring tool. It's a complete solution for uptime, domain, and performance monitoring, with built-in status pages and extensive notification settings. With a focus on transparency, ease of use, and reliability, Oh Dear serves customers worldwide—from sole proprietors to government agencies and large agencies. We can handle anything you throw at us, and we're still working on improving our services on the daily!
