Welcome to UpSiteDown, the simple, accessible website monitoring solution without limits.
If you're a webmaster, you want to ensure that your website(s) are always running at peak performance. Website outages can be very frustrating and stressful, and for business websites, devastating to both company finances and customer reputation!
Website monitors are a great way to keep track of the status of your website(s) in real time. However, most of them require you to create an account on some online service, they can cost a lot of money if you don't want feature limits, and they can potentially be somewhat confusing or completely inaccessible to blind people; yes, blind people can run websites too!
What if there was a solution that didn't require any personal data, was completely free, could monitor an unlimited number of sites, could give status alerts in either speech or braille, and could be controlled from any program on your computer? Introducing... UpSiteDown!
UpSiteDown is a powerful, customisable, accessible, limitless website monitoring tool for Windows that can provide status alerts for any number of websites. All you need to use UpSiteDown is a Windows PC, a sound card, an optional braille display, and a text file containing a list of the sites you want to monitor.
UpSiteDown requires at least Windows 7 or higher in order to run. Both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows editions are supported. You must have a compatible screen reader and braille display for braille output mode to work. See your screen reader's documentation for compatible braille displays and setup instructions.
The highest version of UpSiteDown is V 1.8, compiled on Monday, November 4th, 2024.
UpSiteDownloadUpSiteDown is a portable program, meaning everything the program needs to run is stored inside a single folder. all you have to do is extract the UpSiteDown.zip file to a location of your choice using a zip archiver like 7-Zip.
To start the program, simply launch the UpSiteDown.exe file. If Windows isn't set up to show file extensions, you won't see the .exe part.
When you launch UpSiteDown for the first time, a dialog will appear asking you to enter a website URL. This URL will be stored inside a file called sites.txt, housed in the UpSiteDown program folder. You can add more URLs to this file at any time, either by using the hotkey, Windows+Shift+Control+S by default, or by manually locating and opening the sites.txt file. You don't have to specify the protocol, such as http:// or https://, you can just put in the site's hostname. If no protocol is supplied, the program will assume HTTP and redirect accordingly.
When the program starts, you will hear 'Site monitoring is ready'. It will then sit quietly in the background, monitoring your chosen websites for any status changes. The program won't hog your system tray or task bar; you may even forget that it's running at all! That is, until one or more of your sites dies.
All your program settings are stored inside a file called opts.ini, which is generated automatically upon first launch. This file can be opened in any text editor, or by using the hotkey, Windows+Shift+Control+O by default.
There are 12 hotkeys you can use in UpSiteDown. Of course, with every Seediffusion program that uses hotkeys, you have the power to modify these hotkeys at any time. These hotkeys are global, meaning they can be used from anywhere within the Windows OS.
This controls how the program outputs information. Valid values for this setting are:
The default setting is 1. Note: modes 3 and 4 require a compatible screen reader and braille display for braille output to work. See your screen reader's documentation for compatible braille displays and setup instructions. Don't worry, if you use mode 3 and you don't have a braille display, you will still get speech output through the screen reader.
This is the time to wait between website checks. Set this to 0 for true realtime monitoring. Note, however, that doing this can cause heightened CPU usage. The default setting is 60 seconds.
This controls how long the program waits for a reply from a website before calling it down. The default is 15 seconds.
On by default, this setting controls whether the program plays sounds for site status changes and program errors.
When you're done modifying settings, save the file and close your text editor. If UpSiteDown is running, restart it using the restart hotkey so your new settings are applied properly.
When a site comes back up, UpSiteDown will generate a report of the outage. These reports are written to a file called outage.txt, housed within the UpSiteDown program folder. You can access this file at any time with the Windows+Shift+Control+V hotkey by default, and delete it with Windows+Shift+Control+E.
Outage reports contain the following information:
Although UpSiteDown and all other Seediffusion programs are free of charge, donations and contributions are appreciated, as they help keep Seediffusion alive and support the development of present and future Seediffusion projects. Here are the ways you can give your support:
If you can't give financial support, sharing around also helps. :)