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 internally, and a free tier for 20 hosts.
14 days of Pro to start, then free for 20 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 an internal device | Unknown | Yes |
| Oh Dear: Ping and TCP port monitoring watch a public address externally; nothing documents an internal confirmation for an office or ISP link.hostnag: external and internal | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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/ mo$0/ yrFor your own handful of hosts.
- Monitors
- 20
- Beacons
- 2
- Groups
- 3
- Status pages
- 1
- Seats
- 3
- Every
- 5min
- Locations
- 1
- History
- 30days
- Channels
- Email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Webhook
- More
- No packs
Pro
$19/ mo$190/ yrFor a team's sites, APIs and gateways.
- Monitors
- 100
- Beacons
- 10
- Groups
- 25
- Status pages
- 10
- Seats
- 10
- Every
- 1min
- Locations
- 3
- History
- 90days
- Channels
- Email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Webhook, PagerDuty, Opsgenie
- More
- Packs of 100 monitors at $15 a month, up to 4; packs of 10 beacons at $10 a month, up to 9
Business
$79/ mo$790/ yrFor many groups: clients, products or offices.
- Monitors
- 500
- Beacons
- 100
- Groups
- ∞
- Status pages
- ∞
- Seats
- ∞
- Every
- 1min
- Locations
- 5
- History
- 365days
- Channels
- Email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Webhook, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, SMS
- More
- Packs of 100 monitors at $15 a month, as many as you need; packs of 10 beacons at $10 a month, as many as you need
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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