SMS alerts for website monitoring, no gateway.
Uptimia watches your sites from 171+ locations and texts the number you already answer. Setting it up is one field: SMS is a built-in contact type, so there is no messaging account to open and no invoice to reconcile.
Overview
Last 7 DaysA phone number, not an account
Text alerting usually means a gateway to sign up for, a sender ID to register and a per-message invoice to reconcile. Uptimia sends the message on its own account instead.
A vendor, a sender ID, a bill
Uptimia supports that route too, through the Twilio integration. But it is a procurement task before it is an alert, and afterwards the carrier invoices you directly for every message.
A contact whose type is SMS
The number sits in your contact list beside the email addresses. Uptimia sends the message on its own account and takes one credit from the monthly SMS allowance your plan already includes.
The night nine monitors fell
21:14 on a Sunday: a database stopped accepting new connections and nine checks failed inside ninety seconds. The dashboard filled with nine red rows. The phone showed one text, because those nine monitors shared an escalation policy.
One field: the number you answer
SMS is a contact type, not an integration — nothing to connect, nothing to host. Add the number in international format, point monitors at it, and decide when it may ring.
Add a contact of type SMS
On the Contacts page, pick SMS from the channel grid and type the number in international format, starting with a +. Save it and the contact can take alerts; Verify texts a code to prove the handset is yours.
Point monitors at the number
Attach the contact to one monitor or to all of them. Every monitor keeps its own recipient list, so the checkout can text you while the staging box only sends email.
Decide when it may ring
Quiet hours are set per person, so nights land on whoever is on call. Planned maintenance texts nobody. Put the monitors on an escalation ladder and an unacknowledged alert moves to the next number on its own — ladders come with the Professional plan and above; SMS alerts themselves work on every plan.
Add and verify an SMS number
The Help Center covers the setup and the parts that decide whether a text arrives: verification, country coverage, and how the monthly allowance is spent.
- Adding an SMS contact
- Verifying a phone number
- Country coverage
- How SMS credits work
- When an SMS isn’t delivered
Twelve monitor types, one number
Pinging the homepage tells you about the homepage. A certificate weeks from expiry, a checkout failing on step four, a backup that never checked in — each writes its own one-line message, and each sends its own recovery.
Confirmation, folding and scheduled silence
A text costs a credit and a night's sleep, so every other channel can afford to be chatty and this one cannot. Three rules decide whether a message is worth sending, and all three are yours to set.
Nothing to connect.Just your number.
The whole platform on the trial — every monitor type, and twenty texts to prove the channel reaches you.
What the 160 characters leave out
A text is the interrupt, not the report. The confirming locations, the response-time chart and the incident timeline sit in the dashboard behind it — and they are still there on Monday morning.
Where the evidence lives
The text names the monitor, its status and the minute the incident started. The dashboard keeps the rest: which locations confirmed the failure, what the response looked like, and an acknowledge button if you skipped the link.
It says Uptimia, not a number
Texts arrive from the sender name Uptimia. In North America and around sixty other country codes, where alphabetic senders are not permitted, they come from one fixed long code instead.
Included, not invoiced
Texts come out of a monthly allowance that resets on the 1st. No per-message fee, and nothing to top up mid-month.
Running low is never silent
Uptimia emails you once a month when the balance drops to 20% remaining, and again when it hits zero. Texts pause; every other channel keeps going.
Where it can reach
North America and most of Europe, plus Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India, Brazil and a dozen more.
When one text should become two
On an escalation policy — Professional plan and above — an ignored alert climbs: the next number after the delay you set, then another channel entirely. Planned maintenance sends nothing at all.
How website monitoring SMS alerts work
Uptimia checks your websites from 171+ external locations and, once up to three of them agree an uptime check has failed, sends a plain text message to a phone number on your contact list. Setting it up is a single field — the number in international format — because SMS is a built-in contact type rather than a connected integration: there is no messaging account to open, no sender ID to register and no per-message invoice. Each text names the monitor, its status and the minute the incident started, inside one 160-character message. Messages are drawn from the monthly SMS allowance that comes with your plan. Put monitors on a shared escalation policy — Professional plan and above — and a storm of failures folds into a single text with a signed acknowledge link, and the recovery message reports how long the incident lasted.
Mail waits. A text arrives
The mail was delivered on time and read four hours late, because a phone treats mail as reading material. Email is the right channel for the evidence — it is the wrong one for the interruption.
Outside probes, then a plain text
The check runs outside your infrastructure, so it sees what a customer sees; the text arrives on the one channel a phone still shows unasked. Neither end needs anything installed.
What the text actually says
These are the messages themselves, not summaries of them — the same words your handset shows on its lock screen.
Compare all 12 alert channels →| Event | Sent when | The message, word for word |
|---|---|---|
| Down | Three or more regions agree the check failed | UPTIMIA ALERT (DOWN): Uptime check Checkout DOWN since 2026-07-19, 21:14 |
| Transaction | A recorded checkout or login stops completing | UPTIMIA ALERT (CRITICAL): Transaction test Buy flow FAILED on step #4 since 2026-07-19, 09:02 |
| Trouble | A certificate or domain is approaching expiry | UPTIMIA ALERT (TROUBLE): SSL certificate caldmont.com will expire soon |
| Server | A resource passes the ceiling you set for it | TROUBLE: Server web-01 disk on /var 91% (threshold 90%) |
| Heartbeat | A scheduled job does not check in on time | CRITICAL: Heartbeat Nightly backup missed - no ping received when expected since 2026-07-19, 02:07 |
| Recovery | The failing check goes green again | UPTIMIA ALERT (UP): Uptime check Checkout is UP since 2026-07-19, 21:31 |
SMS alerts FAQ
01How is this different from the Twilio integration?+
02Do I need an account with a messaging provider?+
03How many texts do I get, and what do they cost?+
04What happens if the allowance runs out?+
05Which countries can Uptimia text?+
06Who does the message come from?+
07Can I tap something in the text?+
08What if the message fails to send?+
09Can several people get the texts?+
10Which monitor types can text me?+
One number. Then downtime texts you.
Add the number, verify it, attach it to the monitors that matter. From then on the worst news of the week arrives the way the rest of your life does — as a text.