Self-hosted uptime monitoring with Uptime Kuma
You find out a service is down one of two ways: a monitor tells you, or a customer does. Uptime monitoring is how you make sure it's the first one — and Uptime Kuma is the self-hosted tool that does it beautifully, for free, on a server you own.
What Uptime Kuma is
Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool in the mold of UptimeRobot or Pingdom — but open source and yours. It watches your websites, APIs and services on a schedule and tells you the moment one stops answering. The interface is genuinely lovely: a clean dashboard of every monitor, response-time graphs, and uptime history at a glance.
- Monitors of every kind — HTTP(S), TCP ports, ping, DNS, database connections, and keyword checks that fail if the page stops containing the right text.
- Alerts everywhere you already are — Telegram, Discord, Slack, email, webhooks, and dozens more, so a failure reaches you on the channel you actually watch.
- Beautiful public status pages you can share with customers or a team, so "is it just me?" has a link for an answer.
- Response-time and uptime history to spot the slow degradation before it becomes an outage.
Why self-host your monitoring?
- No monitor limits or paywalls. The free tiers of the hosted tools cap your checks and gate the good features; self-hosted, monitor everything, as often as you like.
- Your own status page, on your own domain — a professional touch without a subscription.
- Independence. Your monitoring isn't one more third-party service that can have its own bad day.
One honest note on that last point: a monitor is most useful when it runs somewhere other than the thing it's watching. Uptime Kuma is light enough to sit on a small separate box (or a different host from your main apps) so it can still shout when the main box goes quiet.
How to deploy it
Uptime Kuma is refreshingly simple — a single app with a small database, behind TLS on a domain. Once it's up, you add monitors through the web UI in seconds, wire in a notification channel, and you're covered. On a VPS that's a five-minute job; or deploy Uptime Kuma in one click and start watching your services before your customers have to.
Deploy Uptime Kuma → — or browse the full catalog of apps you can host and own.