Instant checks vs monitors

HostTracker gives you two different ways to check a site: an instant check you run once, right now, and a monitor that keeps checking on a schedule forever. They use the same underlying check engine, but they answer different questions.

Instant check: “is it okay right now?”

An instant check is a single, on-demand run of a check against a target - no schedule, no ongoing history, no alerts. You get one result, immediately, and that’s it. It’s the right tool when you just want an answer to “is this working right now” without committing to long-term monitoring.

Instant checks are available two ways:

• Signed in, from the IC area of the app - run one against any target and see the result plus a short history of your recent instant checks.
• Anonymously, as HostTracker’s free tools - no account needed. These cover:
  • Website / HTTP check
  • Page speed test
  • Site crawl
  • Ping test
  • Port check
  • Traceroute
  • DNS query
  • Whois lookup
  • SSL certificate check
  • DNSBL (blacklist) check
  • Web Risk (Google Safe Browsing) check

Anonymous checks are rate-limited

Without signing in, a browser may run up to 10 checks per day, and up to 30 checks per day from the same IP address (a shared office or carrier connection counts as one IP). Once you hit the limit you’ll see a sign-up prompt - a free account raises the limit substantially. The limit resets at UTC midnight.

Monitor: “keep telling me if it stops being okay”

A monitor is the same kind of check, but scheduled to run repeatedly at an interval you choose, from locations you choose, with alert contacts subscribed to it. Every run is recorded, state changes become incidents, and a confirmed failure triggers an alert. This is the tool for anything you actually depend on staying up.

Turning an instant check into a monitor

If an instant check’s result looks like something you’d want to keep an eye on, you don’t have to re-enter the target from scratch. Every instant-check result carries a “Turn into a monitor” action that pre-fills a new monitor with the same target and check type - you just pick an interval, locations and who to alert, then save.

When to reach for which

Use an instant check to debug a problem happening right now, to sanity-check a URL before committing to monitoring it, or to answer a one-off question (“is this domain blacklisted?”). Use a monitor for anything you need to know about the next time it breaks, not just this once.

Do it with the API or MCP

A signed-in instant check is POST /check (v2, check:write scope) with a type and url; the answer is the check result inline (no polling). An MCP client uses the run_instant_check tool the same way. The anonymous free tools use a separate, unauthenticated endpoint and share the daily limit described above.

Related

• What a monitor is
• Quickstart: your first monitor
• Monitor types