Author
Jose Franco
Founder, RealUptime
Who he is
Jose Franco founded RealUptime and runs it as a founder-led company. He builds the four products, RealUptime Status, Monitor, Errors and Outages, and the probe fleet they share.
He started the company on one idea: the first answer to an outage should be useful, not reassuring. When a service is healthy in one place and failing in another, the product should show that difference plainly, with each region read separately. The About page explains how that shapes the company.
What he writes about
His articles cover what he works on every day: checking a service from several regions, what a status page should and should not claim, how public outages unfold, and how small teams handle alerts and errors. Where a piece uses RealUptime’s own probe readings, it says so and says what the check can and cannot see.
How the articles are checked
Each article answers one question a reader would type into a search engine, and carries the date it was published. Prices, plan limits and how another product behaves are read from that vendor’s own pages and linked at the sentence that relies on them. An article that turns out to be wrong is corrected, not left standing: email support to report an error.
How these articles are made
Drafted with AI assistance, reviewed and published by Jose Franco.
Where to find him
Articles by Jose Franco
Guides
- Status page best practices
- Incident communication: what to say and when
- Uptime monitoring explained
- What each monitoring status actually means
- How Downdetector works, and when to trust it
- How to choose a status page tool
Blog posts
- Pingdom alternatives now that it is part of SolarWinds
- Statuspage pricing: what subscriber counts cost you
- GlitchTip vs Bugsink: two small Sentry-compatible trackers, and when neither is the answer
- Is Railway down? What Railway's own status page admits it will not show you
- Should you build your own status page? What DIY actually takes
- Rollbar pricing, explained: what the sliding scale and AI credits actually cost
- Monitor a Coolify app from outside the server
- RealUptime is now part of Treepai
- Status page subscriber notifications: what to send, when, and how not to become noise
- How to tell which deploy caused an error (and what to stop claiming when you can't be sure)
- External uptime monitoring for a Hetzner server: why SysMon is not enough on its own
- Free status page tools in 2026: what "free" actually includes
- Why your error tracker keeps grouping unrelated bugs into one issue
- Is Supabase down, or is it your project? How to tell in under a minute
- Status page vs uptime monitor: what each one actually does, and do you need both
- Website down from some locations but not others: what causes it, and how to prove it
- Maintenance windows: how to take a service down on purpose without paging anyone or lying about it
- Downdetector says down. The status page says fine. Why "is it down" sites disagree, and which one to believe
- Is the internet down, or is it just you? How a provider incident is actually measured
- Sentry's free tier: what 5,000 errors a month gets you, and what happens after
- Certificates expire on a schedule. The outages are optional.
- What a TCP port check proves, and what it does not
- Your cron job stopped and nobody noticed. Heartbeat monitoring, explained.
- How often should an uptime monitor check your site? Less than the interval decides
- ChatGPT is down. What the status page said, minute by minute
- What it takes to track services honestly
- RealUptime is public
- Uptime monitor false positives: the page you should not have gotten
- When the monitor is the problem
- One internet, four speeds
- Status pages that can't lie