SSL and domain expiry

Most outages are surprises. Two are not: an SSL certificate and a domain registration both expire on a known date, and both take everything down when they do. These two toggles watch those dates so the fix happens on a calendar, not at 3am.

#SSL certificate monitoring

Turn on the SSL check for any https monitor and it does two jobs:

Clearer failures. A certificate problem normally surfaces as a bare connection error, indistinguishable from a dead host. With the check on, UpCheck probes plain TCP to the same port when a secure check fails: if the port answers but TLS did not, the failure is relabeled an SSL error. You get "fix the certificate", not "the host is down somewhere".

Expiry warnings. The certificate's expiry date is probed about once a day, separately from your regular checks, so it costs your interval nothing. When the certificate is within 14 days of expiring, a warning lands as a push notification on your devices. You are warned once per expiry date; renew the certificate and the new date re-arms the warning for next time.

#Domain expiry monitoring

The domain check watches the registration itself, looked up over RDAP about once a day and cached. When the registration is within 14 days of lapsing, you get the same push treatment, once per expiry date.

An expired domain is the totality outage: the site, the API, and your email all stop resolving at once, and recovery can take days if the registrar puts the name in redemption. It is also the easiest outage to prevent, which is exactly why it deserves a machine watching it instead of a calendar reminder someone snoozed.

#Turning them on

Both are per-monitor toggles in the advanced options: the SSL check on any https monitor, the domain check on any monitor whose target has a registrable domain. Expiry pushes respect your account's notification preferences, so they can be toggled without touching the monitors.

#Reading the warnings

A warning names the monitor and the runway: "Certificate expires in 9 days", "Domain registration expires in 3 days". Day zero and past-due get blunter wording. Treat the first warning as the ticket-filing moment, fourteen days is enough to renew anything, but only if the first day is not wasted.