Website & Domain Monitoring in Telegram

Problem

If you have a website, how quickly would you notice if it went down? Without monitoring you might find the problem too late and lose potential customers or even search rankings.

With 16 years of experience building websites, I've had hosting issues, expired domains and SSL certificates, VPS failures, and DNS/Apache misconfiguration. So I tried many monitoring tools (excluding self-hosted ones). Most of them fall into two extremes:

• powerful but complex platforms that require sign-up, configuration, understanding dashboards;

• poorly built chatbots with limited checks and noisy, unfriendly alerts.

Solution design

I wanted to implement a service with all necessary checks and wrap it in the messenger I use every day.

So I built an easy-to-use Telegram bot: you send a URL, press one button, and monitoring starts.

The bot checks the site every 7 minutes (availability, HTTP status, response time, redirects, page title) and sends a message only when something meaningful changes. It also reminds you in advance if a domain or SSL certificate is about to expire.

Under the hood, it’s backed by clearly defined algorithms (with no AI inlovled) and thousands of automated tests — which lets me evolve the system without fear of breaking existing behaviour. I also built monitoring for the monitoring itself: a set of alert rules to control if the bot is operating properly.

Results

If you have Telegram (I know, not all of you use it), you can try it: @daily_site_monitor_bot

The bot has been running since September 2024 on a single market. At the moment it has 371 active users, 4% of them pay for monitoring additional sites. Total revenue so far is ≈$200.

Now I'm going to make it global. Any suggestions on that and feedback would be very appreciated.