TLDR; "If you expect to receive important emails from a trusted email address it is worth whitelisting the address to make sure that emails won't be accidentally blocked by an overzealous email client." Whatever email client you use, be it Gmail or Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail, you can be sure that it comes with some kind of spam management built in. Most of the time this works well - legitimate emails are delivered to your inbox and spam is either rejected or gets funnelled to your spambox.

One of our main aims when developing Downtime Monkey is to make the user experience outstanding. With that in mind we've rolled out an improvement to the user interface that enables you to view the current status of all your websites at a glance.

Over the last few months we've made several upgrades for Pro users, including: bulk import of monitors and customisable alert times. This time, we have an upgrade for our Free Plan users...

When you visit a webpage that is down, most of the time you'll see an error: you'd see a 404 error if the page can't be found or a 503 if the server isn't unavailable. Although this is not what you want to see, it is helpful. You know that the site is down and have a rough idea why. But sometimes you don't see an error... just a spinning wheel.

We've rolled out a bunch of new features designed to make it quicker and easier to monitor large numbers of websites - you can now add, edit and delete website monitors in bulk. Thanks to everyone who have submitted feature requests - this helps us focus the development of Downtime Monkey on the areas that you want.

Last week, we'll bet you've received an onslaught of "we've updated our privacy policy" emails. If you're a website manager maybe you've been writing those emails and ensuring your site is compliant with the new regulations. It's been interesting (for us anyway) to listen to reactions to GDPR. It seems that people are split between "what a nightmare - so much paperwork" and "this is great - it protects our privacy" and there is no doubt that we have felt a bit of both.

Downtime occurs. It's an unfortunate fact of online life. No website is able to provide 100% uptime - even tech giants like Google suffer downtime, albeit very occasionally. So, some amount of downtime is inevitable, but how much is acceptable? This question is obviously subjective - downtime that's acceptable for one person may be intolerable for another. Therefore, we undertook a little research...

Not all websites are the same. From personal blogs to business websites, online shops to community forums, SaaS applications to video streaming services, websites come in all shapes, sizes and flavours. It follows that not all websites have the same uptime requirements. If a personal blog goes down for 20 minutes it might not be a big problem, but the same downtime for a popular online shop could be a major concern.

A couple of weeks ago we launched a new feature for Pro users: rate limiting SMS alerts. Back then we promised that free users wouldn't be left out and we've just rolled out the planned upgrade to all free accounts: we've increased the available number of monitors from 20 to 60. That's right, you can now monitor up to 60 websites completely free.

We've just rolled out a brand new feature: the ability to set rate limits on SMS alerts. Before we tell you all about it, a big thank you to everyone who has provided feedback or submitted feature requests - it helps us focus on making the improvements that people really want.