Storepulse — store monitor with Telegram alerts

Storepulse is an uptime monitor for your online store with alerts in Telegram. It is not a plugin — it is a standalone PHP application you install on your own hosting, and it watches the store from the outside. Every minute it opens your pages the same way a shopper does, and when the store stops working it writes to Telegram: what exactly broke, when, and what to do about it.

🔴 The main rule: do not install it on the store’s server

This is the most common mistake that makes monitoring go silent exactly when you need it. If the monitor sits on the same hosting as the store, it goes down together with the store — and there is nobody left to send the alert. That is why Store Uptime is a separate application and not a WooCommerce or OpenCart plugin: a plugin inside the store physically cannot report that the store is unreachable.

Put it on any other hosting: a cheap shared account, a subdomain of another project, a VPS. It barely uses any resources — all it needs is PHP and cron. The installer and the readme inside the archive say this explicitly.

How it differs from UptimeRobot

Ordinary monitors check the HTTP status code. But 200 does not mean “the store works”: a page can return 200 and still show the shopper a database error, a blank screen or a hosting stub. Store Uptime looks at what the shopper sees and recognises in the response body:

• the WordPress database error (“Error establishing a database connection”) and the OpenCart one;
• Fatal error, Parse error and the WordPress critical error served with code 200;
• “Account Suspended”, hosting limits exceeded, Resource Limit;
• a parked-domain stub — in other words, a domain that has expired;
• a blank page: an empty response or a sharp drop in size below the threshold;
• a redirect to a foreign domain — a sign of hijacked DNS or a breach;
• a keyword disappearing from the page (“Cart”, “Checkout”);
• maintenance mode that someone forgot to switch off;
• a directory listing instead of the store page.

Plus two things classic monitors do not have at all. First: a failure is confirmed by a second check a few seconds later, so one lost packet will not wake you up at night. Second: downtime of the monitoring itself is caught separately — if cron stayed silent for more than 30 minutes, that is an event and a message, not a fake “100% uptime”.

What arrives in Telegram

The message carries not a dry error code but a reason in plain language and a theory about what to do. For example:

• “Code 200, but the page shows a database error. Hint: looks like the MySQL connection limit is exhausted — a question for the host”;
• “Empty response (blank page). Hint: looks like a fresh plugin or theme update”;
• “The store responds again. Downtime: 14 min” — after a recovery;
• “Cron was silent for 2 h 14 min — nobody checked the store during that time”.

With Pro you can also write to the bot: /status returns a summary of every monitor, /pause and /resume turn the checks off and on — handy before planned maintenance.

How it works, step by step

1. You unpack the archive into a folder on hosting that does not run your store and open it in a browser.
2. The installer checks the requirements, asks for a login, password, language and time zone, and writes config.php.
3. In “Settings → Telegram” you paste the bot token and the chat_id, press “Send a test message” and confirm the alert arrives.
4. You add a monitor: the page URL, the interval and a word that must be present on a working page.
5. You add a cron job every minute — from that moment the checks run by themselves.
6. The store goes down → the check fails → the monitor retries 20 seconds later → the failure is confirmed → an alert with the reason flies to Telegram. The store comes back → a recovery message arrives with the outage duration.

How much it costs

Free — free forever: 2 monitors, a 5-minute interval, 1 Telegram chat, the full store-error detection, the event log and the retry before an alert.

Pro — 890 UAH per year for one copy of the application. A longer term is cheaper: 2 years — 1690 UAH, 3 years — 2350 UAH, 4 years — 2920 UAH, 5 years — 3340 UAH. There are no automatic charges; renewal is manual, with reminders by e-mail 14, 7, 3 and 1 day before the end. When the term expires the application and its Pro features keep running — only updates and support stop.

OpenCart stores get a lifetime licence. For OpenCart, Pro costs 890 UAH once: no term, no renewals, no reminders. It has its own “Buy for OpenCart” button. The yearly licence with a 1–5 year choice applies to WooCommerce / WordPress.

Before buying there is a 7-day Pro trial: one button in “Settings → Licence”, no card required.

Under the hood

Storage is JSON files with flock: a ring buffer of results per monitor plus daily rollups, so “uptime over 30 days” stays true even on a one-minute interval. Concurrent cron runs are separated by tick.lock — no duplicate alerts. Error signatures are searched in the first 20,000 characters of the response body. The panel has its own login, and 5 failed attempts lock the form for 15 minutes. The data/ folder is closed with .htaccess, and the readme has an nginx snippet. The interface and the alerts are available in Ukrainian, Russian and English.

How to install

1. Download the archive with the button at the top of this page.
2. Unpack it into a folder on hosting that does not serve your store — for example /uptime/ on a subdomain.
3. Open that address in a browser and go through the installer.
4. Set up Telegram and add your first monitor.
5. Add the cron job: * * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/uptime/cron.php >/dev/null 2>&1

Updating means replacing the application files; config.php and data/ are left alone, so settings and history survive.