New Feature: Rate Limit SMS Alerts

06 Feb 2018

We've just rolled out a brand new feature: the ability to set rate limits on SMS alerts.

Before we tell you all about it, a big thank you to everyone who has provided feedback or submitted feature requests - it helps us focus on making the improvements that people really want.

The video gives a short overview with full details of the feature below:

Rate Limiting SMS Alerts

You can now set an SMS rate limit on your account - this rate limit sets the maximum number of 'down' text message alerts that will be sent in an hour.

What are the options?

The options are: 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 or unlimited 'down' alerts/hour

Are 'up' alerts limited?

Yes. For every down alert that is sent, a corresponding 'up' alert will always be sent when the website goes back up.

So if you set the rate limit at 3/hour, you'll receive a maximum of 3 'down' alerts and 3 corresponding 'up' alerts - a maximum of 6 text messages in total. This way you'll always be kept informed of each website's status.

Monitoring multiple webpages

Rate limits will be really useful for people who monitor a lot of webpages, for example:

1) Web Agencies or Webmasters who manage multiple websites that are hosted with the same hosting provider or on the same server.

2) Website Owners or Managers who monitor multiple pages on a single website.

Why?

If a web server has a problem, all the websites on that server usually go down around the same time.

If you monitor 30, 100 or 1000 websites and they all go down at once, without rate limiting you'd be bombarded with text messages.

With a rate limit in place, a few alerts would be sent before the limit is reached so you'll still know that there is a major issue. You'll be able to take action quickly, whether this is a phone call to your hosting provider or a reboot of your own server. However, you'll not get flooded with alerts.

When each site comes back up you'll receive an 'up' message - you can then relax knowing that your sites are online.

How To Set The Rate limit

This feature is only available to Pro users but to make sure Free account holders don't feel left out we're rolling out a different upgrade for free accounts very soon - to stay in the loop follow us on Twitter @DowntimeMonkey).

It's really simple to set a rate limit for your account: