Hey Ben 👋

I'm sorry you had a bad experience. Let me elaborate on this issue.

Imagine your website fails for every 5th request. Most uptime monitors would then keep opening and closing incidents for your site since sometimes they get a successful response, and sometimes they don't.

This could open 100s of incidents for a single site within a few hours and completely flood your inbox.

We do 2 things to prevent this.

a) we always check your site from at least 3 regions, before saying it's "up" or "down"

b) you can configure your "verification period" in the advanced settings of your monitor, which is the period we wait for after the first successful incident recovery, before closing your incident. If you set it to "immediate recovery" and a single request passes, we'll close the incident.

However, the specifics depend on your individual setup! Say you block all traffic from non-US countries; or have a CDN with a firewall throttling requests from our servers, etc, your experience might be very different.

I'd recommend two things: our incident timeline page should tell you what's going on. If you see events like "waiting for incident recovery" and then "incident reopened", it's likely that a certain percentage of requests for your site keeps failing. These incidents are always super tricky to identify and fix!

However, our support team already helped 100s of sumolings in the last few days to configure their monitors correctly, so I'd encourage you to ping us at hello@betteruptime.com. We're happy to help you with the setup and investigate what's going on in your case.

I hope this helps at least a bit. Thanks again for the feedback!