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Alert cooldowns and notification-volume protection

Understand when Uptime Basics suppresses duplicate alerts, how hourly state-change protection works, and what remains available while notifications are limited.

Uptime Basics sends alerts for meaningful monitor state changes. It does not send a new email or SMS for every failed check because repeated copies of the same outage are difficult to act on and can hide a later recovery message.

Standard notification safeguards

Safeguard Current behavior
Repeated Down cooldown At least 15 minutes between repeated Down notifications for one monitor
State-change protection Up to six state-change notifications per monitor in one hour
Account activity protection Repeated notifications may be limited further during unusually sustained activity

These safeguards apply to notification delivery. They do not change the monitor's Up or Down status, stop incident tracking, or remove check results.

Email and SMS limits are different

Email alerts are included with every paid plan and are subject to anti-duplicate and fair-use safeguards. Uptime Basics does not describe email delivery as unlimited or as a bulk-messaging service.

SMS also uses the same state-change safeguards, but each plan has a separate monthly SMS segment allowance. Reaching the SMS allowance does not disable email alerts, monitoring, incidents, or logs.

What Suppressed means

A Suppressed alert was intentionally not delivered because a cooldown, state-change limit, account protection, channel allowance, or another delivery rule applied. It does not mean the underlying check was ignored.

Alert History remains available for 14 days and can show whether a notification was queued, delivered, failed, or suppressed. Use the incident timeline and Detailed Logs when you need the complete monitoring record rather than only the notification record.

During sustained account activity

If unusually high check, timeout, notification, or diagnostic activity could affect reliable service, Uptime Basics may temporarily limit repeated notifications. The dashboard shows Monitoring and notification protection active when this changes customer-visible behavior.

These protections do not create an overage charge or require a plan upgrade. Normal delivery resumes automatically after the protection clears.

Reduce avoidable alert volume

  • Correct monitors that repeatedly alternate between Up and Down.
  • Use accepted status codes when an expected 401, 403, or other response is healthy for that endpoint.
  • Increase the slow-response confirmation count for a naturally variable site.
  • Review timeouts, redirects, request headers, and authentication for recurring configuration failures.
  • Pause a monitor while performing planned maintenance if alerts are not useful during that window.

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