updown release notes updown.io

New

🚀 HTTP/2 protocol is now supported since June 11th, 2022. It is used by default when available, like in most HTTP clients. A small tag has been added to the dashboard to show if your website is monitored using HTTP/2:

Improvement

🛑 It is now possible to stop following redirects by providing the HTTP redirect status code in the "contains" field. Read more.

💡 updown now detects websites redirecting from dual-stack to IPv4-only server in order to automatically disable dual-stack monitoring. This avoids receiving alerts saying IPv6 is broken when you can't improve the situation, and it no longer have to be disabled manually. Read more.

📱 SMS alerts are now limited to 100/day/account in order to avoid draining credits too quickly during big outages, and also to prevent network operators throttling.

New

The multi-site status pages released a couple months ago now have their API so you can automate the creation and maintenance of these pages, check out the endpoints documentation here.

You can use these API endpoints to update the list/order of websites, the name and description (to automatically update in case of planned maintenance for example or known problems).

New

The first version of the recipients API has been released, it allows to list all possible recipients in your account (/api/recipients endpoint) and to modify the list of recipients selected for each check (recipients attribute in the /api/checks endpoints). You'll find the updated documentation here: https://updown.io/api

So you can now perform the same changes as on the bulk edit page but from the API, and thus automate the creation/update of checks while selecting only some recipients.

It is also possible to add new recipients (email, sms, webhooks, etc..) from the API using the POST endpoint.

Let me know if this is working well for your needs and if you notice any issues.

🧑‍🏫 Pro tip: before playing with the API and messing with your configuration, you can open the bulk edit page to have a snapshot of your current recipients configuration (as checkboxes). This way in case of problem you can just submit this form to restore the snapshotted configuration (don't reload the page before of course 🙃).

New

After months of development and beta testing, we are now releasing the domain expiration reminders feature publicly. The goal is to warn you a couple days before your domain expires in case you forgot to renew it. This feature is disabled by default, you'll need to enable it in your settings if you want it:

(this is because for many people it'll probably be useless and noisy)

⚠️ Note that some TLDs do not share expiration date or simply refuse to run an open RDAP or WHOIS service so this will not work with ALL domains but so far our success rate is about 80%. If your TLD supports RDAP (you can verify with https://rdap.org/domain/example.com) and gives an expiration date here you should be good to go. If your TLD does not support RDAP but responds to WHOIS queries and has an expiration date, most of them will be supported by our parser, if not feel free to open an issue or a PR or just ask us and we should be able to add support.

Improvement

Since the beginning it has not been possible to specify an expected HTTP status code (though it was possible to specify a string to search in the body response, which often allowed to circumvent this limitation).

Well it is now possible to specify an expected HTTP status code (other than the default 2xx), in the same place you could specify a string to search, the tooltip has been changed accordingly:

This can be useful if you need to monitor an endpoint with a non 2xx status but which doesn't return any body (or not stable enough to match on). The error message will be the same for now: UP/DOWN (short version) or "Couldn't find the configured string" (long version) because it's simpler. I'll see about changing that a bit if it creates confusion.

New

We've just added support for internationalized URLs, showing unicode chars in domain names, path and query. Like in browsers, this is for display only. underneath the URL is stored normalized in ASCII format to remain valid and it is this one that is sent to your server.

You can paste an IRL when creating a new check, updown will accept it and convert it to the appropriate format automatically (this is also true for ASCII characters which are not allowed in URLs).

It's possible there are still some places where the ASCII version will be shown instead of the unicode one. As always, let us know if you have any feedback about this new feature.

Fix

We've been using UserVoice for quite some time for feature suggestion, FAQ and customer support contact widget:

The thing is in the end this was just a very limited UI for an email, as support is anyway handled the same way and by the same person (me) on support@updown.io.

And among the years we hit some deliverability issues, likely caused by UserVoice not supporting proper DKIM signing. Also some clients had bad experience because they thought this was a live chat. Overall many opportunities for frustration.

So in order to address this problem in the simplest way possible – and as UserVoice is not gonna change soon – I decided to stop using this widget in favor of direct email. Twitter is also an option for people still using it ☺

I slightly reworked the footer to make the Support button more visible to compensate for the widget button being gone, also it'll now includes the account name in the subject by default:

New

For a while, French clients have benefited from a 0% VAT because we were VAT exempt in France 🥖 but unfortunately good things don't last forever. updown revenue keeps increasing (thank you 🙇), this means we are no longer VAT exempt and have to start collecting the French VAT (20%) for individual and company purchases from France, starting September 1st 2021.

↻ Note that if you have auto-renew enabled, the subsequent payments after September 1st will automatically include the VAT.

Do not hesitate if you have any questions.

New

After a couple months of private beta we are now releasing multi-site status pages (example):

You can choose the title, description, list of checks to show and customize the order. It's also possible to serve them from a custom domain like we did for single-page status pages. By the way if your single-site status pages are public, they'll be accessible from the multi-site status page. You should easily find the new feature in the (slightly reworked) top menu:

This was one of the most requested features of all time, and more options will surely come later. Let us know what you think and what you would like to see in the feedback tool or by contacting us.

Improvement

Also part of this release is a new system to connect custom domains to single-site or multi-site status page, using an additional TXT record instead of only one CNAME:

The advantages are:

1. It works with ANAME / ALIAS records (or "CNAME flattening"), which means it can be used on root domains now.
2. It scales better because the hostname containing the token was not good for DNS resolver caching (thousands of similar but different entries).
3. It can work with transparent proxies like CDNs, as long as they don't prevent us from obtaining the TLS certificate for your domain (ACME challenge).
4. It can be used with more complex tokens and identifiers which makes it more future proof too and easier to debug.

Don't worry the previous system using only one CNAME is still working and will not be removed anytime soon but you are encouraged to use the new one. The new setup page (which should make it easier to debug problems by the way) will only help you using the new way.

New

We've been using BitPay to accept Bitcoin (BTC) and BCH payment for a while now, but they recently broke our account, without any reason or warning, their support is not responding (of course) and considering the poor reputation and compatibility they created, we didn't even care wasting our time trying to get it back.

Instead we worked on replacing them by a new provider, and took this opportunity to improve our cryptocurrency support. We searched for a solution with at least:

• A couple other popular altcoins (e.g. ETH, LTC)
• Lightning Network support for instant transactions with very low fees.
• A decent UI, not forcing users into giving their personal informations

After some research we settled on CoinGate as our new provider, they checked all the boxes and even support a lot more altcoins. So starting today you'll find a new payment form which should be easier to use:

(the email address is not required)

Please give it a try and let us know if you have any problem with this new provider or if you would really like to use another altcoin not supported here.