Healthchecks Hosting

How Healthchecks works

Healthchecks gives every monitored job a unique ping address and an expected schedule. A task sends a request when it starts, succeeds, or fails. If the expected success signal does not arrive within the configured period and grace time, the check changes state, allowing the operator to identify work that stopped running or took longer than expected.

The model is a dead man’s switch rather than active website probing. It is well suited to backups, database maintenance, queue processing, imports, certificate renewal, scheduled reports, and other recurring processes that can call a URL. Separate checks, tags, projects, schedules, and APIs help operators organise a larger collection of jobs.

Key Healthchecks features

Simple intervals cover tasks that should report every few minutes or hours, while cron expressions describe more precise schedules and time zones. Start and completion signals can expose unusually long runs, and failure signals distinguish a job error from a job that disappeared entirely.

Notification integrations are a separate layer from check evaluation. The software can connect to email, webhooks, chat, SMS, and incident services when their requirements are configured. The packaged template still evaluates pings without email, but every alert channel must be checked against the packaged configuration and any provider account it needs.

Healthchecks vs Cronitor

Healthchecks specialises in heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs and similar periodic tasks. Cronitor also monitors cron jobs, while its hosted service includes active website checks, uptime monitoring, status pages, telemetry, and provider-managed alert delivery in a broader commercial platform.

Cronitor may suit teams that want several monitoring modes and a vendor-operated service under one account. Healthchecks is a strong fit when the priority is a compact self-hosted dead man’s switch and the operator already knows how alerts will reach the people responsible for each job.

Who uses Healthchecks

System administrators use Healthchecks to supervise backups, synchronisation jobs, certificate renewal, cleanup scripts, and data pipelines. Developers can monitor scheduled workers or report generation, while small operations teams group checks by service and tag them by owner or urgency.

Healthchecks does not replace metrics, traces, log aggregation, or active HTTP availability monitoring. It reports whether expected signals arrive. A script can still complete while producing incorrect output, so high-value jobs may need separate validation of the result in addition to a successful ping.

Self-hosting Healthchecks: requirements and cost

Load is shaped by the number of checks, ping frequency, projects, integrations, API activity, retained history, and concurrent users. PostgreSQL stores accounts, checks, schedules, states, projects, and notification configuration. It is included but unmanaged, with database memory excluded from the exported application minimum.

AvaHost recommends Plan 2 at €5 after the PostgreSQL step-up. The deployment includes one-click provisioning, custom-domain HTTPS, automatic application updates, and scheduled backups. A superuser is created and public registration is closed. Application email is disabled, so mail alerts, email verification, login links, reports, and recovery are unavailable; configure and test only supported non-email integrations with their own provider credentials.