Barkme Blog
Uptime Monitoring Tools in 2026: An Honest Comparison
Nine uptime monitoring services side by side, including ours. Who each one suits, where each one is weak, and the one check almost none of them run.
Read the post →Fail2ban: A Practical Way to Quiet the Bots Hammering Your Server
Every server on the internet gets probed within minutes of going online. Fail2ban reads your logs and bans the addresses doing it. Installation, the SSH jail, a custom jail for .env scans, and how to avoid banning yourself or your own uptime monitor.
Read the post →How Often Should You Check Your Website Is Up?
Checking every 30 seconds is not four times better than every two minutes. How check frequency actually maps to the downtime your customers notice, and how to pick an interval per site.
Read the post →Why Your Uptime Monitor Cries Wolf
A monitor that pages you for every blip trains you to ignore it, and the one alert that mattered arrives to a muted phone. What causes false downtime alerts, and how to remove them without going blind.
Read the post →When Your Domain Lands on a Blacklist
A domain on a DNS filtering list or mail blacklist stops resolving for some visitors while your monitor stays green. How domains get listed, why every subdomain suffers, and how to get off the list.
Read the post →The Expiry Dates That Take Websites Down
Most outages announce themselves with a failed request. Certificate and domain expiry do not, until the deadline passes and the whole site is gone at once. How to catch both in advance.
Read the post →What a 500, 502, 503 or 504 Is Actually Telling You
A field guide to the status codes a monitor reports at 3am. What each one means, what usually causes it, and the timing patterns that tell you where to look first.
Read the post →How SSL Works
What the padlock actually proves, how a certificate comes to be trusted, what happens in a TLS handshake, why certificates keep getting shorter, and the errors you will meet in practice.
Read the post →How DNS Works
What happens between typing a name and reaching a server, what the record types mean, why 'propagation' is really just caching, and the DNS mistakes that take sites down.
Read the post →Try it on your own sites
Add your first monitor in 3 clicks
Barkme checks your sites around the clock and barks the moment one goes down. Free plan, no card required.
Start free