Notification channels
Choose how you want to be told when something goes wrong.
Overview
When DomainDash detects a confirmed problem with one of your sites, it sends you a notification. Depending on your plan, you can receive these by email, SMS, Slack, or any combination of the three. Email is available on every plan, including Free. Slack is available on Starter plans and above. SMS is available on Pro and Business.
For setting up Slack, see Slack notifications. For SMS, see SMS notifications. The rest of this page covers how each notification type works and what to expect.
DomainDash sends four types of notification:
| Notification | When it's sent | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent alert | A critical issue is confirmed — your site is down or your domain has expired. | Email (all plans), SMS (Pro and Business), Slack (Starter and above) |
| Ongoing updates | Periodically during an active critical incident, so your team knows DomainDash is still tracking the problem | |
| Daily digest | Every morning, if you have open non-critical incidents | |
| Resolved | A critical incident has been resolved and your site is back to normal | Email, SMS (Pro and Business), Slack (Starter and above) |
Urgent alerts are sent to every member of your team, so nobody misses a critical outage. The daily digest groups lower-severity issues into a single email so you're not overwhelmed with individual notifications for things that aren't immediately urgent.
Setting up email notifications
Email notifications work out of the box. As soon as you create an account and add a site, you'll receive alerts at the email address you signed up with. There's nothing extra to configure.
- Verify your email address
Make sure you've verified your email address during sign-up. DomainDash can't send notifications to an unverified address.
- Check your spam folder
If you're not receiving notifications, check your spam or junk folder. Adding
inbox@domaindash.ioto your contacts can help ensure delivery. - Check your plan's alert channels
Your plan determines which notification channels are available. On the Free plan, only email is available. If you need SMS alerts, upgrade to Pro or Business.
Setting up SMS notifications
SMS notifications are available on Pro and Business plans. When enabled, your team receives a text message for critical incidents — the kind that need immediate attention, like a site going completely down or an SSL certificate expiring.
SMS is configured from Team settings → Notifications. You'll enter a phone number, verify it with a six-digit code, and you're set.
For a full step-by-step guide, see SMS notifications.
SMS is for critical issues only
To keep SMS notifications useful and avoid alert fatigue, text messages are only sent for critical incidents — when your site is completely down or your domain has expired. Lower-severity issues are covered by the daily email digest.
How each notification type works
Urgent alerts
When a critical incident is confirmed, DomainDash sends an urgent alert to every member of your team within about a minute. The email tells you exactly what's wrong, which site is affected, and links straight to your dashboard. If your plan includes SMS, you'll get a text message too.
If multiple critical incidents are confirmed around the same time, DomainDash batches them into a single notification rather than sending one per incident. This keeps things manageable if several sites go down at once.
Ongoing updates
During an active critical incident (P0), DomainDash sends periodic email updates to your team so you know the problem is still being tracked. These start arriving shortly after the incident is confirmed and become less frequent over time — more often at first when you're likely actively investigating, then spacing out as the incident continues.
Each update includes how long the incident has lasted and how many checks have failed. They stop automatically when the incident is resolved.
Daily digest
Every morning (based on the team owner's timezone), DomainDash checks whether you have any open non-critical incidents. If you do, it sends a summary email listing each incident, grouped by severity:
- Needs fixing: SSL certificate expired, certificate invalid, DNS failing
- Needs attention: site running slowly, SSL certificate expiring soon
- Worth knowing: domain name expiring soon
Each item shows how long the incident has been open, so you can prioritise accordingly.
Resolved notifications
When a critical incident is resolved, for example your site comes back up or your expired domain is renewed, DomainDash sends a follow-up email to let your team know. It tells you which site recovered, what the problem was, and how long it lasted.
Who gets notified?
Notifications are sent to every member of the team that owns the affected site. If you're part of multiple teams, you'll only receive notifications for sites belonging to the teams you're a member of.
There's no way to opt individual team members out of urgent alerts. If you're on the team, you get the notification. This is by design: when a site goes down, everyone should know.
Managing your notification settings
All notification channels are managed from one place. Head to Team settings → Notifications to see collapsible panels for Email, Slack, and SMS. From here you can:
- See which channels are active and which need setup
- Route Slack messages to specific channels per category
- Turn SMS alerts on or off
- Verify or change your SMS number
Team owners and admins can change notification settings. Everyone else can see the current configuration but can't make changes.
Related
- SMS notifications for a step-by-step SMS setup guide
- Slack notifications to post alerts into your team's Slack channels
- How incidents work for how DomainDash detects and confirms problems
- Site settings to customise how DomainDash checks each site