Uptime monitoring for Render apps
Render tells you when a deploy fails. SitePulse tells you when a successful deploy breaks your app in production. External 1-minute checks, email alerts on cold-start timeouts and runtime crashes, and a free public status page. Free for 5 monitors.
The cold-start problem
Render free-tier services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity. The first request after spin-down can take 30–60 seconds. Your users see a blank screen. Render sees a healthy service.
SitePulse pings your service every 5 minutes on the free plan — enough to prevent spin-down and catch any actual downtime. On the Pro plan ($9/mo), probes run every minute to catch runtime crashes the moment they happen.
What to monitor on a Render app
Web service
Your production URL. Catches deploy regressions, crashes, memory exhaustion, and cold-start timeouts within one probe interval.
/api/health endpoint
A route that does a real DB query and returns 200 or 503. Catches Render PostgreSQL degradation, Redis issues, and connection pool failures before users notice.
Background workers
Expose a /health route on your Render background worker. Workers crash silently — memory leaks, unhandled rejections — and Render restarts them without notifying you.
Free-tier keep-alive
Set a 5-minute interval monitor on your free Render service. SitePulse pings it regularly, preventing the 15-minute spin-down. Users get instant responses instead of 45-second cold starts.
Cron job endpoints
Monitor the HTTP endpoint your Render Cron triggers. If a daily cleanup or report job starts 500ing, you'll know within a probe interval.
Public status page
SitePulse's free status page shows your monitor's 30-day uptime history. Share it with users or embed it in your docs. Cuts 'is X down?' support tickets in half.
Set it up in 60 seconds
- Sign up — free, no credit card.
- Paste your Render service URL (custom domain or *.onrender.com).
- Add /api/health if you have one.
- Free plan: 5-minute checks. Pro: 1-minute checks ($9/mo).
- Email alert fires the moment a monitor goes red.
What you get
Keep-alive pings
5-minute checks on Free plan prevent Render free-tier spin-down. Upgrade to Pro for 1-minute crash detection.
SSL expiry alerts
Email 14 days before your TLS cert expires. Render doesn't manage custom-domain certificates for you.
Public status page
Free on every plan. 30-day uptime history, custom slug, shareable with customers.
Stop cold starts from surprising your users
5 monitors, 5-minute checks, email alerts, public status page — free forever. No credit card.
Frequently asked questions
Render free tier spins down after 15 minutes — how does that affect monitoring?+
On Render's free tier, services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity and take 30–60 seconds to cold-start on the next request. SitePulse will detect this as a slow response or a timeout and mark the monitor as degraded or down depending on your timeout setting. If you want to keep a free-tier service warm, set the SitePulse check interval to 5 minutes — it'll ping the service before Render spins it down. On paid Render plans, services stay warm and cold starts aren't an issue.
How do I catch a Render deploy regression?+
Add a /api/health endpoint to your service that returns 200 when your app is working correctly (database reachable, env vars present, key dependencies healthy). Point SitePulse at it. After every deploy, SitePulse will hit that endpoint within a minute — if the deploy broke something, you get an email before any user reports an issue.
What about Render's built-in health checks?+
Render's health checks decide whether to route traffic to a new deploy. They run once, at deploy time. SitePulse runs continuously — every 1 or 5 minutes, indefinitely. A service can pass Render's deploy-time health check, run successfully for 10 minutes, and then start failing because a memory leak exhausted the container. SitePulse catches that; Render's deploy check doesn't.
I'm using Render Cron Jobs — can I monitor those?+
Yes. Render Cron Jobs trigger an HTTP endpoint on your service. Add a SitePulse monitor pointing at that same endpoint with the same authentication header. If the cron route starts returning 500, you'll know within a minute instead of finding out when a user notices the missing report.
Render already sends deploy failure emails — why do I need SitePulse?+
Render emails you when a build or deploy step fails. It cannot email you when a successfully deployed service starts failing in production — broken at runtime after a successful deploy is the most common and most dangerous failure mode. SitePulse covers that gap.