About our monitoring bot
If you have found IsItDownNowBot in your logs, this page tells you exactly what it is doing, how often, and how to stop it.
What it is
IsItDownNowBot is the availability probe behind IsItDown.now. It makes an unauthenticated HTTP GET request to a single public URL on your site and records whether it answered, how quickly, and with what status code. It does not crawl, does not follow links, does not index content, and does not store your page.
How to identify it
If a request identifying itself that way fails in a manner characteristic of bot filtering - A 403, 406, 421, 429, or a connection that opens and then stalls - The probe retries the same URL once with a standard browser user agent. That is not an attempt to evade you; without it, this site would report several of the most reliable services on the internet as permanently down. Either way it is one page request per hour, and at most two.
How often
Every 20 minutes, per monitored service. For a site in our directory that is 72 requests a day to one URL. There is no burst behaviour, no parallel fetching of assets, and no attempt to render the page - We read the first couple of kilobytes of the response and close the connection.
What it reads
- The HTTP status code.
- Time to first bytes, plus DNS and TCP connect timings measured separately.
- The
Serverresponse header, if present. - Your TLS certificate's expiry date, read during the handshake.
- The first ~2 KB of the response body, which is discarded immediately and never stored.
It never submits forms, never authenticates, never downloads assets, and never requests anything but the single configured URL.
How to block it
Add this to your robots.txt and the probe will stop:
Blocking by user agent or IP at your edge also works and we will not route around it. If you would prefer we monitor a different URL - A lightweight health endpoint rather than a heavy home page, for instance - Say so and we will switch to it; that is better for both of us.
Removing your service
If you operate a service listed here and want it removed from the directory, email us from a domain-verifiable address and we will deactivate it. Historical records are retained but the page stops updating and is removed from the index.
Why we bother explaining
Most monitoring traffic arrives unannounced and unexplained, which leaves operators guessing about a user agent they have never seen. Publishing what our probe does, how often, and how to turn it off costs us nothing and saves somebody an afternoon.