Oh Dear – a simple way to truly understand how your website is doing

The world of websites moves faster every year and becomes increasingly dependent on automation, APIs, security, and reliable uptime. When something breaks, it almost always happens at the worst possible moment – during a campaign, over the weekend, or in the middle of the night. That’s exactly why we decided to bring a solution to Zone customers that provides daily peace of mind and confidence that everything is working as it should. Let’s take a closer look at a monitoring tool with a rather charming name: Oh Dear.

What is Oh Dear?

Oh Dear is a website monitoring platform that keeps an eye on your website and its most critical components 24/7. It alerts you immediately when something goes wrong and helps prevent issues that could negatively affect your business, your customers, or the overall user experience.

In short: when something happens on your website, Oh Dear finds out before your customers do.

Key features of Oh Dear

• Uptime monitoring – checks whether your website is actually online and how quickly it responds
• Broken link detection – finds internal and external links that lead nowhere
• SSL certificate monitoring – alerts you when a certificate is about to expire or is misconfigured
• Domain expiry checks
• DNS change monitoring
• Cron jobs and background task monitoring
• Performance monitoring – helps you spot when your website starts slowing down

All results are presented clearly and cleanly, without unnecessary noise or complexity.

Who is Oh Dear for?

For marketers

Marketing campaigns don’t tolerate downtime. When ads are running or a new landing page has just gone live, it’s critical to know that everything is working as expected. Oh Dear alerts you immediately if something goes wrong, so you can react quickly – before broken pages or outages start affecting results.

For developers

For developers, the key question is whether a deploy introduced something unintended: broken links, slower response times, SSL issues, or a failed cron job.
Oh Dear helps spot these issues early – before end users ever notice them.

For agencies and teams

Agencies often manage multiple clients and dozens of projects at the same time. Oh Dear lets you keep all projects under one account and maintain a clear overview of what’s happening across client websites. This reduces manual checks and improves communication with clients – you know what’s going on before questions start coming in.

For website owners

If your website is managed by someone who doesn’t want to deal with technical problems, the most important signal is a simple one: is everything working or not? Oh Dear provides clear, easy-to-understand alerts and helps you avoid unpleasant surprises – without requiring technical expertise.

Why services like this become even more critical in 2026

• Websites are becoming more complex – each site relies on more integrations, APIs, and background processes
• Users have zero tolerance for disruptions – if a page doesn’t load within 2–3 seconds, they leave
• Security requirements are higher than ever – SSL, domains, and DNS must be properly configured at all times
• SEO and advertising budgets are affected immediately – a single broken campaign page can waste an entire budget
• Monitoring is no longer a “nice to have” – it’s a standard requirement

Ease of use: why users like Oh Dear

One of the strongest aspects of Oh Dear is its clear and easy-to-understand interface – even though it’s a technical tool at its core.
For the average user, everything is logical, visual, and well structured. Marketers can quickly see what’s working and what isn’t, while developers have access to a deeper, more technical view when needed.

For more technical users

When more detailed insights are required, Oh Dear provides:

• HTTP checks from multiple global locations
• DNS change auditing with historical timelines
• Cron job heartbeat monitoring
• Mixed content detection on HTTPS pages
• Queue backlog monitoring and health checks (when integrated with your application)
• Webhooks and a wide range of integrations (Slack, Teams, Discord, email, SMS, and more)
• An API for connecting Oh Dear with your own systems

Before and after: how Oh Dear makes life easier

Without monitoring, problems usually reach you only after the damage is already done. A website goes down and the first alert comes from an unhappy customer. An SSL certificate expires unnoticed, and suddenly browsers show a red warning right in the middle of a campaign. A slow or broken landing page stays unnoticed until performance metrics start dropping. And when a deploy breaks a navigation link, no one notices until traffic visibly declines.

With Oh Dear, the situation is completely different.

You’re alerted to issues before anyone else experiences them. SSL certificates and domains stay under control, performance changes show up as early signals, and all projects are visible in one clear, centralised overview. Monitoring doesn’t just help you put out fires – it helps you prevent them altogether.

In summary

Oh Dear is a tool we also use ourselves at Zone. That’s exactly why we’re happy to offer it to our customers – because we know first-hand how much time, stress, and uncertainty it helps eliminate. It’s a solution for anyone who values a reliable website and a clear overview of what’s happening – whether you’re a marketer, developer, agency, or website owner.

If you’d like to add monitoring and smart alerts to your website, you can easily order the service here.