Our checker
ExpiryOwlBot
If you found this address in your logs: that was us. ExpiryOwl monitors certificates, domains and uptime for web agencies, and one of them asked us to watch a site you run.
User-Agent
ExpiryOwlBot/1.0 (+https://expiryowl.com/bot)
What it does
| Certificate check | Opens a TLS connection on port 443 (or the port the customer set), reads the certificate chain and disconnects. No HTTP request is sent. Every 6 hours per monitored host. |
|---|---|
| Uptime check | One GET request for the page the customer chose, following redirects, with a 15-second timeout. At most every minute, depending on the customer's plan; usually every 5 to 15 minutes. |
| Keyword check | Same GET request; we read up to 1 MB of the response to look for the text the customer asked for. |
| Domain and DNS | Queries go to registries (RDAP) and public DNS resolvers, not to your server. |
| Free tools | A one-off certificate check when someone uses a tool on this site. Rate-limited per visitor. |
It doesn't crawl, follow links, submit forms, execute JavaScript or store page content. It only visits hosts that a customer added to their account or typed into a free tool, and it never connects to private or internal addresses.
Asking us to stop
Email [email protected] with the hostname and we will stop checking it, usually the same day. Because every check is requested by someone monitoring their own (or their client's) site, robots.txt doesn't apply to it, in the same way it doesn't apply to a browser.
Want the same checks on your own sites?
The free plan watches 5 domains for one client: certificates, domain registration, DNS and uptime every 15 minutes. No card, no trial clock.