DownSpotter

What we do

You enter a domain. We normalize it, refuse anything that is not public HTTP or HTTPS, resolve DNS to public addresses only, and request headers from that host. We classify the result as up, down, degraded, or unknown — and we never call a site globally down from a single failed request.

How monitoring works

User checks are cached briefly so we do not hammer origins. Popular domains can be polled on a schedule. Long-tail domains are checked on demand. Crawlers receive cached pages only; they cannot trigger live probes. Confirmation checks exist so a lone timeout is not published as an outage.

What we are not

DownSpotter is not an open HTTP proxy, a port scanner, or a guaranteed global view of the internet. We do not fetch private networks, cloud metadata, or non-HTTP protocols. Browser “down for me” tests are best-effort and never treat CORS as downtime.

Accuracy

A CDN can fail in one city and work in another. We hedge our language on purpose: “appears to be down”, “unreachable from our monitoring infrastructure”, “multiple checks indicate an outage”. If our own monitor is unhealthy, we say we could not determine status.