Question 1

Is it really free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Scanning is free forever for signed-in users — unlimited scans, all four scan types, fix guidance and full history. No trial timer, no credit card.

Question 2

Do I need an account?

Accepted Answer

Not to get started. Guest mode gives you three free scans with no sign-up. When you want unlimited scans and saved history, sign in with Google in one tap.

Question 3

What does a security scan actually check?

Accepted Answer

Every scan runs four checks in parallel: HTTP security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options and more), SSL/TLS (certificate validity, expiry, protocol versions and chain of trust), DNS health (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), and HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects and mixed content. You get one clear grade and the exact issues behind it.

Question 4

How long does a scan take?

Accepted Answer

Seconds. All four scan types fire at once rather than one after another, so a complete security picture — grade, issues and fixes — is ready in well under a minute.

Question 5

How is PatchPings “AI-powered”?

Accepted Answer

AI does the work an expert would after the data is collected: it reads each finding, explains it in plain English, scores it by real-world risk, and writes the exact copy-paste fix for your stack. For monitoring, AI learns your site’s normal behaviour so alerts only fire on genuine problems.

Question 6

What's the difference between scanning and monitoring?

Accepted Answer

A scan is an on-demand snapshot of a site’s security right now. Monitoring runs continuously in the background — checking uptime every five minutes, watching certificate and domain expiry, and alerting you the moment something breaks.

Question 7

How often do you check my site’s uptime?

Accepted Answer

Every five minutes, from multiple regions around the world. That’s frequent enough to catch real downtime within minutes, without flooding you with noise.

Question 8

How do you avoid false alarms?

Accepted Answer

Before any alert fires, we verify the outage from several independent regions — if only one region can’t reach you but the others can, it’s a network blip, not your site, and nothing pings you. On top of that, our AI learns each site’s baseline so it can tell a real anomaly from normal variation. The result is zero false alerts.

Question 9

What alerts can I get, and how?

Accepted Answer

Uptime outages, SSL certificate expiry, domain expiry and blacklist hits — delivered by push notification, email or webhook (Slack, Discord, PagerDuty or your own systems). You also get a recovery notice when things are back to normal.

Question 10

Will you warn me before my SSL certificate or domain expires?

Accepted Answer

Yes. We watch the live certificate and your domain registration and warn you well in advance — typically at 30, 14 and 7 days out — so a missed renewal never turns into a customer-facing outage.

Question 11

Do I need to install anything on my server?

Accepted Answer

No. There are no agents, scripts or DNS changes required. PatchPings checks your site the same way a visitor’s browser would — you just provide the URL.

Question 12

Is my data safe?

Accepted Answer

We only scan what’s publicly reachable about your site — the same information any browser receives — and we never store your website’s content. Your account details and scan history are private to you.

Questions, answered.

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