Downcheck: DIY Website Monitoring using Go and Git

Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash

📡 Downcheck?

Like many of my side projects, downcheck started with a simple need:

I needed a clean, simple way to make sure my personal website, my side-hustle landing page, and a client’s web shop were always live — without managing five different free tiers.

Sure, there are plenty of uptime monitoring services out there. And many of them are free — until you actually want specific alerts, custom checks, or anything beyond the basics. At that point, you’re usually forced to get a subscription.

I wanted something simpler, and fully under my control.

So I built downcheck:

GitHub - TomDeneire/downcheck: CLI to check if websites are up and push the result to a git repo

⚙️ How it works: Go + git

In essence, downcheck is a small CLI tool written in Go. Because it’s Go, it compiles to a single static binary — meaning you can drop it onto a server or a Raspberry Pi without worrying about installing runtimes or managing dependencies.