hostnag vs Oh Dear
Oh Dear is a website-health toolkit for agencies: uptime, broken links and mixed content, certificate health, DNS and domain monitoring, scheduled tasks, application health and Lighthouse, with a status page and client reporting per site. The mail records and blocklists beside the rest, a heartbeat that confirms an office link from inside, and a free tier for five hosts.
Free for five hosts. No card, nothing to install.
Side by side
Oh Dear read from its public documentation on 2026-09-17. Tell us if it changed.| What breaks | Oh Dear | hostnag |
|---|---|---|
| A host goes downwebsite, API, VPN, mail, gateway | Yes | Yes |
| Oh Dear: Every minute from 33 checkers in 16 cities, a failure re-checked from an alternative location before anything is raised. | ||
| A certificate expiresdays-before thresholds, daily inside the last window | Yes | Yes |
| Oh Dear: 7 days ahead for Let's Encrypt and 14 for other issuers by default, up to 100. | ||
| A domain lapsesregistration expiry from RDAP | Yes | Yes |
| Oh Dear: Read over RDAP several times a day, a warning 10 days ahead by default. | ||
| A certificate is swappedfingerprint changed, wrong host, chain not trusted | Yes | Yes |
| Oh Dear: Correct hostname and chain health checks, and a before-and-after comparison of the certificate fields when it changes. | ||
| A DNS record driftsexpected answer missing or changed | Yes | Yes |
| Oh Dear: Every two hours it queries every authoritative nameserver and reports when records change or stop resolving. | ||
| An ISP link dropsthe public address from several locations, by ping or a TCP port, confirmed by a ping from inside the site | Unknown | Yes |
| Oh Dear: Ping and TCP port monitoring watch a public address from outside; nothing documents an inside confirmation for an office or ISP link.hostnag: outside and inside | ||
| Mail stops being deliveredMX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and blocklists, at the expiry cadence of your plan | Partly | Yes |
| Oh Dear: A daily DNS blocklist check of the domain and its resolved IP against four security lists and seven content filters; no MX, SPF, DKIM or DMARC check. | ||
| Someone issues a certificate for your domainnew certificates in the transparency logs, daily | Unknown | Yes |
| Oh Dear: No certificate transparency log watch is documented on the certificate page. | ||
| A scheduled job stops runningcron, backups, workers: a heartbeat that goes quiet | Yes | Yes |
| Oh Dear: A unique URL per task and a grace window, five minutes by default. | ||
| Your nameservers or registrar changenameservers, registrar, DNSSEC, certificate issuer, DNS answers, redirect targets | Partly | Yes |
| Oh Dear: NS record changes and EPP status code changes are reported; nothing documents a registrar change or redirect targets. | ||
| A vendor you depend on has an incidenttheir status page read for an outage or degraded state, the incident named | Unknown | Yes |
| Oh Dear: Nothing documents reading a vendor's status page.hostnag: read from their own status page | ||
UNKNOWN means their documentation did not say either way on the day we read it. PARTLY is covered with a limit noted in the cell.
What Oh Dear has that we don't
- Broken links and mixed content crawling, sitemap monitoring and Lighthouse SEO and performance runs.
- Application health checks through its own PHP package, and AI-powered checks.
- A status page with a custom domain on every plan, client reporting and a port scanner.
Switching
- 01List your sites from the Oh Dear API, which every plan includes; each site is a row per check you want to keep.
- 02Put them in a CSV with at least the columns type and target (name, interval, port, keyword, expected_status and record_type are optional; the import dialog links a template) and upload it in the import dialog.
- 03Uptime becomes http, TCP port tcp, DNS records dns with their record_type, certificate health tls_cert, domain expiration domain_registration; scheduled tasks become heartbeats with a new hostnag ping URL to point the job at.
- 04Ping (ICMP) monitors carry over as Ping monitors, run from hostnag's own probes.
- 05Broken links, mixed content, sitemap, Lighthouse and application health have no counterpart in hostnag.
- 06Check intervals snap up to the nearest hostnag preset (1, 5, 15, 60, 360 or 1440 minutes).
- 07Monitors are created up to your plan's limit; the rest stay listed in the preview so nothing is lost silently.
Pricing
No free tier: a 10-day trial, then Solo at $17 a month for 2 sites, Freelance $55 for 10, the 50-site plan $165, up to Scale at $439 for 200 and custom Enterprise, every feature on every plan.Free
$0/ moFor your own handful of hosts.
- Monitors
- 5
- Groups
- 1
- Status pages
- 1
- Seats
- 1
- Every
- 5min
- Locations
- 1
- History
- 30days
- Channels
Pro
$19/ moFor a team's sites, APIs and gateways.
- Monitors
- 50
- Groups
- 10
- Status pages
- 10
- Seats
- 5
- Every
- 1min
- Locations
- 3
- History
- 90days
- Channels
- Email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Webhook
Business
$79/ moFor many groups: clients, products or offices.
- Monitors
- 500
- Groups
- ∞
- Status pages
- ∞
- Seats
- 25
- Every
- 1min
- Locations
- 5
- History
- 365days
- Channels
- Email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Webhook, SMS, PagerDuty, Opsgenie
Sources
Read on 2026-09-17.- https://ohdear.app/features
- https://ohdear.app/features/continuous-certificate-monitoring
- https://ohdear.app/features/domain-monitoring
- https://ohdear.app/features/dns-monitoring
- https://ohdear.app/pricing
- https://ohdear.app/features/dns-blocklist-monitoring
- https://ohdear.app/features/scheduled-task-monitoring
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