The Hund Blog

So, your website is down. Your monitoring tool fired off an alert, and your team is scrambling to fix it. But what about your customers? An alert in a private Slack channel does nothing to calm the nerves of a user who can't access your service.

This is the critical difference between a pure monitoring tool and a true status page service. While tools like UptimeRobot and StatusCake are excellent at telling you when there's a problem, they fall short on the most important part: communicating that problem to your users.

Let's compare these two popular monitoring services with Hund.io to see why effective communication is the real end game.

What is a Status Page, Really?

For many monitoring tools, a status page is an afterthought or a simple add-on to the core monitoring product.

• UptimeRobot offers a very basic status page, even on its generous free plan. It’s functional, but it lacks the customization and depth needed for professional communication.
• StatusCake provides a more feature-rich status page, but it’s still positioned as a secondary feature to its diverse monitoring checks (like page speed, domain, and SSL monitoring).
• Hund.io, by contrast, is a communication platform first. The status page isn't an add-on; it's the core product. This means every feature, from its integrated monitoring to its incident lifecycle, is designed to create the clearest, most professional, and trustworthy communication possible.

Monitoring

While UptimeRobot and StatusCake focus on the breadth and depth of their monitoring checks, Hund.io focuses on making monitoring actionable for communication.

• UptimeRobot and StatusCake are fantastic for granular monitoring. They can check everything from simple HTTP endpoints to specific TCP ports and DNS records. The goal is to generate an alert for your internal team.

• Hund.io’s integrated global monitoring serves a different primary purpose: to automatically and accurately update the status of your services on your public-facing page based on ICMP, HTTP, DNS, TCP, or UDP target health. This means Hund.io's integrated monitoring is just as capable as dedicated services, but with the unique advantage of being directly tied to your public communication. It closes the loop between detection and communication. Hund.io also offers an official Zapier integration to ease integration with your existing tooling.

Managing the Incident Lifecycle

What happens after the initial "down" alert? This is where the difference becomes stark.

• UptimeRobot and StatusCake are focused on "up" vs. "down." Their incident tracking is relatively basic because their job is mostly done once the alert is sent.
• Hund.io provides a complete incident lifecycle. You can create custom statuses (“At Risk,” or “Degraded Performance”), schedule maintenance, and publish detailed postmortems after an incident is resolved. This allows for nuanced, transparent communication that builds customer confidence, rather than just stating that a service is "down."

The Final Word: Alerting vs. Communicating

• Choose UptimeRobot if: You need simple, reliable, and highly affordable uptime monitoring. Its free plan is generous, and it’s a perfect starting point for individuals and small projects.
• Choose StatusCake if: You need a more advanced suite of monitoring checks, including page speed and domain health, and consider a status page a "nice-to-have" feature.
• Choose Hund.io if: Your primary goal is to build trust with your users through clear, professional, and automated communication. It’s for businesses that understand that monitoring is just the first step, and that managing the customer-facing narrative during downtime is what truly matters.

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