Frequently asked questions

PulseStack is an all-in-one monitoring platform that watches your uptime, your SEO crawlability and your security posture from one place. Instead of stitching together three separate tools, you configure monitors, alerts and public status pages in a single account.

No. The Free plan needs no card at all. It gives you 5 HTTP monitors checked every 5 minutes, plus one public status page. If you want the paid features, every paid plan comes with a 14-day trial that needs no card either, so you can test the full toolset before you commit.

Every paid plan includes a 14-day trial, with no card needed. During the trial you get the full feature set of the plan you chose, so you can wire up alert channels and SEO monitoring, and see multi-location checks at work, before deciding. If you have not added a card by the end, your account moves to the Free plan.

You can add a monitor in a couple of minutes. Pick a monitor type, paste in your URL or host, choose a check interval and select where alerts should go. HTTP monitors need nothing more than a URL to start reporting status.

For uptime, SEO and security monitoring, no. PulseStack checks your endpoints from the outside, the same way a visitor or search engine would. Server diagnostics, available on the Team and Enterprise plans, are the exception where deeper host-level insight is gathered.

There are five tiers. Free (5 monitors, HTTP only, 5-minute checks, 1 status page, no card). Starter at GBP 9/mo (50 monitors, 60-second checks, all monitor types, plus SSL, DNS and domain insights and SEO monitoring). Pro at GBP 19/mo (150 monitors, 30-second checks, plus competitor tracking). Team at GBP 39/mo (500 monitors, plus server diagnostics, SMS alerts, 3 seats). Enterprise at GBP 99/mo (2,000 monitors, 5 seats, PDF reports, up to 9,999 status pages).

Free is limited to HTTP monitors on a 5-minute interval. Paid plans unlock all nine monitor types and faster checks: 60 seconds on Starter, and 30 seconds on Pro, Team and Enterprise. Paid plans also add SSL, DNS and domain insights and SEO monitoring, and higher tiers add competitor tracking, server diagnostics and more team seats.

Free gives you 5, Starter 50, Pro 150, Team 500 and Enterprise 2,000. A monitor is a single thing you are watching, such as one URL, one port or one scheduled job's heartbeat.

Team includes 3 seats and Enterprise includes 5 seats. The Free, Starter and Pro plans are aimed at a single operator or a small setup.

Pro, Team and Enterprise check every 30 seconds. Starter checks every 60 seconds. Free checks every 5 minutes (300 seconds). Faster intervals mean you learn about an outage sooner.

Yes. You can move up or down between tiers as your needs change. If you outgrow your monitor count or need faster intervals, extra monitor types or more seats, you move to the tier that covers them.

There are 9 monitor types: HTTP, Keyword, TCP Ping, Port, API, Heartbeat, SSL certificate, DNS record and domain expiry. HTTP watches a web endpoint, Keyword confirms a specific string is present in the response, TCP Ping and Port check network reachability, API checks a JSON or REST endpoint, and Heartbeat listens for a signal from your own jobs. The SSL certificate, DNS record and domain expiry monitors watch your certificates, records and registration. The Free plan covers HTTP monitors, and paid plans unlock every type.

A Heartbeat monitor waits for a regular signal from something you run yourself, such as a cron job, backup script or scheduled task. If the expected ping does not arrive on time, PulseStack flags it. It is the way to monitor work that runs on a schedule rather than an endpoint you can poll.

A Keyword monitor fetches your page's HTML, without running JavaScript, and checks that an expected word or phrase is present, or absent. This catches cases where a page returns a 200 status but the real content is broken, replaced by an error message, or missing an element you rely on.

Yes. Every website, keyword, API, ping and port monitor is checked from London, New York and Sydney, and is only marked down when at least two of those locations fail. That helps tell a genuine outage apart from a regional network problem or a false alarm from a single vantage point.

Interval depends on your plan. Free runs every 5 minutes (300 seconds). Starter runs every 60 seconds. Pro, Team and Enterprise run every 30 seconds. A shorter interval means faster detection.

Yes. Maintenance windows let you pause alerting for a planned period, so a deployment or scheduled downtime does not trigger notifications or dent your public status page reporting.

Server diagnostics give deeper host-level insight beyond simple reachability. They are available on the Team and Enterprise plans, on top of the standard monitor types.

PulseStack supports 8 alert channels: Email, SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, Telegram and Webhooks. You choose which channels a monitor should notify, so alerts land wherever your team already works.

Yes. You can route a monitor to multiple channels, so a critical service might post to Slack, page an on-call engineer through PagerDuty and send an email at the same time.

Yes. The Webhooks channel posts alert data to an endpoint you control, so you can pipe events into your own tooling, chatops or incident workflow.

Yes. PagerDuty is one of the 8 supported alert channels, alongside Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and Telegram, so alerts can flow straight into your escalation process.

SEO monitoring runs 8 crawl checks that look at how search engines see your site. It watches crawlability signals so infrastructure problems that hurt indexing are caught early, rather than being discovered weeks later when rankings have already slipped.

Security Shield runs 10 light-touch security tests, graded A to F, that assess your public-facing posture. It gives you a clear grade so you can see at a glance where your setup is strong and where it needs attention. It is a separate subscription: the free tier audits security headers for 1 site, and paid tiers cost GBP 29, GBP 69 or GBP 129 a month.

Security Shield is light-touch. Most of its 10 tests read publicly available information, such as your headers, TLS setup, cookies and DNS records. The open-ports test does connect to common ports, and subdomain discovery looks up likely subdomains, so it is not purely passive. It is designed to surface configuration issues safely.

Yes. SSL certificate, DNS record and domain expiry monitors are included from the Starter plan upwards. SSL and domain expiry monitors alert you when expiry is within the number of days you set (7 by default). Together these help you avoid the classic outages caused by a lapsed certificate or an expired domain registration.

Yes. Public status pages let you share live service health with your customers. Even the Free plan includes one status page, so you can keep users informed without upgrading.

The Free plan includes 1 public status page. Paid plans are built around larger monitor counts and the full feature set, so you can present status for the services you are watching.

Yes. When you schedule a maintenance window, planned downtime is handled as maintenance rather than being reported as an unexpected outage, which keeps your public status page accurate.

If you have not added a card by the end of the trial, your account moves to the Free plan, which keeps 5 HTTP monitors on a 5-minute interval and one status page. To keep the extra monitor types, faster intervals and higher limits from your trial, add a card and choose the paid tier that fits.