Six free tools we built so you don't have to alt-tab

I keep a folder of bookmarks called “is this site dead”. It’s tools.upwatch.dev now. You should probably bookmark it too.

When something feels off with a website — yours or someone else’s — you usually want one of about six answers: Is it actually down, or just down for me? How fast is it really? Is the SSL cert about to explode? What security headers is it sending? Who owns this domain? Who owns this IP that’s hammering my logs?

There are existing answers for all of these. They’re scattered across ten different sites, each with their own ads, signup walls, and weird affiliate links. We got tired of that and built them ourselves into one clean surface. No signup, no rate-limit-after-three-checks, no “sign up to see the rest of the result”. The whole reason they exist is that we use them every week ourselves.

Here’s what each one does and when you’d reach for it.

Is It Down?

The first question. You type a URL, we hit it from a data center network and tell you what status code came back and how long it took. If the request couldn’t connect at all, we tell you why — DNS failed, TLS broke, connection refused, timed out.

When to use it: something feels broken, but you’re not sure if it’s you, your network, or the site. The cheapest answer to “is this on my end?”. Also useful when a customer reports a site is down and you want a second opinion from outside their network.

Response Time Tester

Same thing, but with a rating. We hit the URL and give you the latency plus a label — Fast, OK, Slow, Bad — against thresholds developers actually use. Under 300ms is healthy, 800ms+ users notice, 2s+ they leave.

When to use it: you suspect your site is slow but you’ve only been testing it from across the room from your origin server. Or your boss says “it feels slow” and you want a number to put against the vibe.

SSL Certificate Checker

Open a TLS connection, read the cert, show you the issuer, expiry date, days remaining, SAN list, and chain validity. We grade the result A through F. Days remaining is the field that matters — if you see fewer than 30, set a reminder; fewer than 7, treat it as an incident.

When to use it: any time you suspect a cert issue. Or before you launch anything new. Or quarterly on every site you own, because forgotten renewals are still the single most preventable production outage I know of.

HTTP Header Inspector

We fetch the URL, dump every response header it sent, and grade the security posture against the modern set — HSTS, CSP, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy. The score is out of 100.

When to use it: when you’re hardening a site and want to know what’s missing. Or when you’re poking at someone else’s site and want to know whether their security is taken seriously. The score on its own is not a security review, but a 25/100 is a clear signal.

WHOIS Domain Lookup

Registrar, when the domain was registered, when it expires, the name servers, DNSSEC status, domain status flags. Most personal contact information is redacted (GDPR), but everything operationally useful is still there.

When to use it: mostly to check expiry on domains you don’t remember registering, or to verify which name servers a domain is pointed at when DNS feels weird. Also useful before you ask “is this domain available?” — a recent registration date + privacy-protected owner usually means it isn’t really for sale.

IP WHOIS Lookup

Type an IP, get the owner organization, country, ASN, network range, and abuse contact. Works for IPv4 and IPv6.

When to use it: something in your logs is making you nervous and you want to know if it’s AWS, Cloudflare, a residential ISP, or a bulletproof host in Belarus. The ASN is the most useful field — two IPs in the same ASN belong to the same operator, even if they geo-locate to different countries.

How this fits into the rest of Upwatch

None of these tools require an account. There’s no upsell wall. We built them because we wanted them, and because every page of free, useful content on the internet beats one more “sign up to see results” experience.

That said: one-shot checks are snapshots, not monitoring. If you want a tool to watch a URL on a schedule, page you when it goes down, track SSL expiry continuously, and let you publish a status page from the result — that’s Upwatch proper. Ten monitors are free forever, which is enough for most side projects and a lot of small teams.

If you find yourself reaching for one of these tools twice in a week for the same URL, you probably want to be monitoring it instead.