Edward Coleridge Smith

Saturday afternoon, kids in the sea, phone buzzes. “Hey, just noticed the site's throwing a big security warning?” Let's Encrypt auto-renewal had failed silently, with no email, no alert, nothing, and the first warning came from the client. Their site is a medical certification platform I built and maintain, and they happened to be starting an exam session using it that morning. Pretty bad time to start throwing scary browser warnings.

I didn't have my laptop with me and I was a couple of hours from home, so I ended up sitting on a bench renewing the SSL cert through Laravel Forge on my phone, kids running over every few minutes to ask why I wasn't playing with them. Lucky I got it to work at all.

I run a small consultancy and manage a handful of client sites, and that wasn't the first time something like this had happened. It was just the one that finally made me think: I don't really want to keep doing early-morning checks on every site to make sure nothing's quietly broken overnight. I'd rather have something watching them so I don't have to, and pinging me before the client notices.

So I built DomainDash, an idea I'd had in my head since 2022. It checks uptime, SSL expiry, DNS changes, and domain registration across every site you manage, and tells you in plain English (Healthy, Needs attention, Down) instead of “TLS handshake failure” or “HTTP 503”. You can forward an alert straight to a non-technical client and they'll actually understand what's going on.