Watchdog · Website and domain name
Your customer should not be the first to notice your site is down.
Waakhond knocks on your website's door all day long, and keeps an eye on two dates that expire quietly and that almost nobody has in their calendar: your security certificate and your domain name.
Why you want this
A website that is down does not cost money because it broke. It costs money because it takes hours before anyone notices.
Your website goes down while you are working
A visitor gets an error and does not try a second time. Nobody calls to tell you something is wrong — except, hours later, a customer who happened to notice.
- Enquiries and orders you never see arrive
- Visitors clicking through to the next result instead
- An emergency repair at the weekend, at emergency rates
A red warning in the browser
When your security certificate expires, visitors see no website but a notice that the connection is not secure. Those certificates run out every few months; it is not a question of whether you will miss one, but when.
- Visitors dropping off at the word "not secure"
- Forms and orders nobody dares to complete
- A problem that one day of foresight would have prevented
Forgetting to renew your domain name
If your domain name lapses you lose not only your website but your email as well. Everything sent to that address arrives nowhere.
- Unreachable for everyone who already had your address
- Buying it back can get expensive, or impossible if somebody was quicker
- Recovery measured in days rather than hours
One price for all your sites
You pay one amount, not per website: €9,00 per month for up to 10 sites. Useful once you have more than one — a shop alongside your main site, a landing page, or your customers' sites. Your first one is free.
Why this is not another watching tool
Plenty of services can tell whether a website is still running. What we add is the part you would otherwise have to handle yourself.
One place for your website and your email
Your site and your mail are both how people reach you. Here they share one environment, one bill and one way of alerting you. No second account, no second invoice, and no second kind of warning to learn.
Dutch, and free of dashboards
You get no wall of gauges to draw your own conclusions from. You get a message in plain language: what is wrong, what it means for your customers, and what to do next.
We say so when we cannot see something
Not every expiry date can be looked up. Where it cannot, we say we do not know — instead of a green tick that means nothing. So you always know what you can actually rely on.
A Dutch company on European servers
We are not an American provider with a European tickbox. Emerald Elephant Solutions is a Dutch company, Dutch law applies, and the data processing agreement is yours to download from your own environment. The service runs on European servers, and backups are encrypted here before they go to storage in Amsterdam — the key does not travel with them.
So what is it?
Waakhond does three simple things, continuously, without you having to think about them.
The first is opening your website the way a visitor does, and seeing whether it answers — and how quickly.
The second and third are two expiry dates. Your security certificate, which keeps that warning out of the browser. And your domain name, which your entire online presence hangs from. Both expire one day, and neither sends you a reminder you can rely on.
What it does for you
- Knocks on your website regularly and checks whether it answers, and how fast.
- Confirms an outage before telling you — a single hiccup is not an outage.
- Warns you well before your security certificate expires, so you can renew it calmly.
- Keeps an eye on your domain name's expiry date, as far as the registry for that extension publishes it.
- Lets you know when everything is working again, too.
- Respects your quiet hours, so at night you are only woken for something that genuinely matters.
Honest about one limit: not every domain extension releases the expiry date. For .nl the registry (SIDN) does not, and some extensions offer no way to look it up at all. In that case we say we cannot see it. You will never get an "all clear" from us that we cannot back up.
Getting started
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1
Enter your address
You paste in your website's address. That is all there is to it.
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2
We take it from there
From that moment we watch availability, the certificate and the domain name. Nothing to install, and nothing to change about your site.
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3
Say when you want to be left alone
Set your quiet hours. If something stays broken during them you hear about it as soon as they are over — so you miss nothing, you are simply not woken by it.
Works with any website, wherever it runs and whatever it was built with.
For those who want the details
This last block is for your system administrator or web developer.
- Availability: HTTP(S) status and response time, with a threshold for slowness. A finding is only reported after two consecutive failures, so a single hiccup raises no alarm.
- Certificate: read straight off the connection, with a warning from fourteen days before expiry. An unreachable site deliberately produces no finding here — that is the availability check's job.
- Domain name: retrieved over RDAP (bootstrap per RFC 7484, expiry per RFC 9083), warning from thirty days. Registries that redact the date — SIDN for .nl — and extensions without RDAP, such as .eu, .be and .de, are reported as "unavailable" rather than as "fine".
- Checks run on our own infrastructure inside the EU. No agent on your server, no script on your page.
- Addresses in private or reserved IP ranges are refused, so the service cannot be used as a detour into an internal network.