Site Patrol grows up

Happy Sunday!

It’s meant to be a day of rest, but Site Patrol had other ideas. Most of today went on it, with a few other bits squeezed in around the edges.

Plans, texts and status pages

• Pro and Business plans. Pro now covers 10 websites, and there’s a new Business plan for anyone looking after lots of sites, with up to 50 websites, checks every 30 seconds on 10 of them and five status pages. It’s all on the pricing page.
• Text message alerts. If a site goes down, Site Patrol can now send you a text, and it comes from “SitePatrol” rather than a random number. Pro includes 20 a month. I tested it on my own phone this afternoon and it felt very official.
• WhatsApp next. Meta has to check the business and approve the messages first, which can take a couple of days, so fingers crossed for midweek.
• Status pages on your own address. Every status page now gets its own name.sitepatrol.app address, or you can put it on your own domain, something like status.yoursite.com, with a helper that walks you through the DNS. On Pro you can add your own logo, colour and contact details too, and notices now show tags and when a problem was resolved.
• Live view. A link you can open on another screen to watch every check tick by. Perfect for a spare monitor or a TV in the office. The links run out, so you’re not leaving it open for the world.

The app is looking the part

The apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac are coming along nicely on TestFlight, but I’ll be honest, the Mac app looked messy this afternoon. Icons in every colour, cards that didn’t match and titles printed twice. So I went through every screen and set one set of rules for the lot. Icons now sit in Site Patrol green, with green, amber and red kept for up, slow and down only. Cards all match and the headers are calmer. Overview, Live view and Sites each have one clear job, and the website checker has a better name, Website health. Build 158 went off to TestFlight just before tea, and it already feels like a proper Mac app.

IONOS, the verdict

Yesterday I said the IONOS review would be an interesting read. Well, it’s out. A day after paying, I still had no working mailbox, eight upsells, a support ticket nobody had answered all weekend and, when I tried to cancel, “an error has occurred in our systems”. I’ve now sent my cancellation in writing, so we’ll see how that goes. The full story, with screenshots, is in my IONOS Mail review.

Someone on Bluesky made a great point about it. Support is the hidden feature that can make or break an email service, and it’s very hard to judge until the day you need it. My tip now is to send a question on a weekend before you commit, and see how long it takes a human to answer.

Odds and ends

• Mail App 2.1 is out, with a new Add domains button. Sign in with Cloudflare, pick your domain and it’s added, no keys to copy and paste. Chris and I are both on it already.
• Newsletter Sender now has a proper share picture, so links show a big card on X and Bluesky. It’s also joined the other apps on paulobrien.dev and the “Also by Paul” footer on this site.
• A few app pictures on paulobrien.dev were slow to show up, so a fix for that is on its way.

Have a lovely evening.

As always, sharing the love.

Stay safe