DomainDash

DomainDash could tell you a client's site was up. Not that it actually worked. Just shipped the fix.

When I launched DomainDash, every check answered one question: did the site respond? That's useful right up until the server returns a cheerful 200 OK over a homepage reading "Database connection error" — or a bad deploy quietly removes the checkout. The site is "up". It's also broken.

So this week: content checks.

You give a site one assertion that should always hold on the page:

• Text: a word or phrase that should be there (your price, "Add to basket", the footer copyright).

• Element: a CSS selector that should exist (the checkout form, the booking widget).

• Data: a JSON fragment an API response should still contain ({"status":"ok"}).

If it fails, the site is marked Down and you get the same urgent incident you'd get if it had gone offline — email, Slack, SMS. You hear about it before your client does.

Two decisions I'm happy with:

• The page never comes back to us. The assertion runs out at the edge checker (Rust), and only a yes/no verdict returns — we never store what was on the page. Felt wrong to start hoovering up client page contents just to confirm a word was present.

• It's honest about what it can't do. The checker reads the HTML your server sends, before any JS runs. If your page is rendered entirely client-side, it sees the empty shell — so we say that up front rather than letting a check fail mysteriously.

Full write-up with screenshots: http://localhost:5200/updates/content-checks-2026-06-30/

If you point it at a real page, the thing I'd most value: does the incident wording read right the day something actually breaks? That's the moment it has to be clear, and it's the bit I most want torn apart. Content checks are on Pro — all new sign-ups get a free 30 day trial.

The big one this week: you can now publish public status pages for your sites.

Because DomainDash is already checking your sites, the page just reflects what it sees — a site goes down, the page says so; it's responding slowly, it says that; the incident clears, so does the page. No manual toggling mid-outage. Add your own logo, colours and domain, and let visitors subscribe so they hear about problems straight from the page.

It's part of a wider v1 push. Also shipped recently:

• Content checks: assert a page contains the right text or element, not just that it returned a 200

• Plain-English insights that tell you what's worth looking at, instead of another dashboard

• Outbound webhooks, plus SMS and Slack alerts

Quiet milestone along the way: 1,813,952 checks run across 16 sites.

Status pages are on Pro and up. Full write-up with screenshots on the blog.

When I launched DomainDash three weeks ago, the sites page was a row-based table — clean, but more inbox than dashboard. A few said (and a couple of paying users) the same thing in nicer words.

The rebuild is live. Three changes:

• Card grid replaces the row-based table. Each site gets its own card with favicon, domain, current status, and a sparkline of recent response times. The right shape for "I have many small things and want to see all of them at a glance."

• "All sites" aggregate card, top-left. Total sites, anything currently down or slow (red/amber if non-zero), aggregate uptime % over the period. The room-temperature read in a single glance instead of scanning rows.

• A watch list on the aggregate card. The bit I'm most pleased with. When something needs attention, the card surfaces up to three concerns in plain English — "SSL on example.com expires in 3 days," "redactr.io has been Slow for the last 2 hours," "DNS on api.acme.com is down" — with a "+N more" link if there are others. Turns the dashboard from a status display into a "what should I do today" list, which is closer to the actual job most DomainDash users are doing.

Full write-up with before/after screenshots is on the changelog: https://domaindash.io/updates/sites-dashboard-redesign-2026-05-12/

If you've been kicking the tyres on DomainDash, would love to know whether the watch list surfaces the actual things you'd want to know about. If it's noisy or missing something obvious, that's the bug worth hearing about.

Free tier still covers 1 site, code NOTAGAIN still gets you a free month of Pro if you want to point it at more.

Saturday afternoon, kids in the sea, phone buzzes.

Hey, just noticed the site's throwing a big security warning?

Let's Encrypt auto-renewal had failed silently. No email, no alert, nothing, and the first warning came from the client. Their site is a medical certification platform I built and maintain, and they happened to be starting an exam session using it that morning. Pretty bad time to start throwing scary browser warnings!

I didn't have my laptop with me and I was a couple of hours from home, so I ended up sitting on a bench renewing the SSL cert through Laravel Forge on my phone, kids running over every few minutes to ask why I wasn't playing with them. Lucky I got it to work at all.

I run a small consultancy and manage a handful of client websites, and that wasn't the first time something like this had happened. It was just the one that finally made me think: I don't really want to keep doing early morning checks on every site to make sure nothing's quietly broken overnight. I'd rather have something watching them so I don't have to, and pinging me before the client notices.

So I built DomainDash, an idea I've had in my head since 2022, that finally went into production last week.

It checks uptime, SSL expiry, DNS changes, and domain registration across all your client sites. When something goes wrong, it tells you in plain English: Healthy, Slow, Down, instead of "TLS handshake failure" or "HTTP 503". You can forward an alert straight to a non-technical client and they'll actually understand what's going on.

Three things that catch out most client sites (from my unscientific sample):

1. SSL auto-renewal silently failing because the validation request can't reach the host (usually a recent firewall or DNS change broke it)

2. Domain expiring because the credit card has expired and no one's logged into the registrar portal since the day it was registered

3. DNS records changing without warning because someone on the client's team "made a quick fix" and forgot to tell anyone

If you want to try it on a single domain without signing up, there's a free public check tool at domaindash.io/check.

Pricing: free tier (1 site), then $90/yr for 5 sites, $190/yr for 15. Extra sites are $20/yr each, deliberately cheap because the pricing's built around small agencies managing 20+ tiny client sites, not enterprise teams running one big app.

A bit more on the stack, since people often ask: the actual checkers (uptime, SSL, DNS, WHOIS) are small Rust Lambdas that scale to zero between runs, which is what makes the per-site infra cost low enough to support that pricing. The platform itself is Laravel with Inertia + Vue, boring on purpose because I've shipped a lot of those and it stays out of my way. The time-series check results live in TimescaleDB rather than vanilla Postgres, which is a much better fit for the write-heavy, append-only shape that check data has.

What I'm nervous about:

I posted about the launch on my personal LinkedIn last week, and it absolutely tanked: 134 impressions, 2 reactions, 1 comment, 0 signups. In retrospect that's obvious. My LinkedIn is full of people who work at companies with dedicated ops teams, not the people who get texts from clients on a Saturday afternoon. And recruiters, oh so many recruiters.

So I'm doing what I should have done from day one, which is talking to people who actually build and run their own stuff.

I'd love feedback on:

• Any other consultancy / agency owners here: how are you currently handling this? Homegrown scripts? Paid tools? Vibes and hope?

• Landing page is at domaindash.io, and brutal feedback is very welcome.

• Does the "Healthy / Slow / Down" framing land, or does it feel too soft?

Happy to AMA on any of the stack choices, the pricing maths, or the 3-month build.

P.S. If anyone wants to try it on real sites, code NOTAGAIN gets you a free month of Pro, no card required. The name is, regrettably, autobiographical.