Get called when UptimeRobot says your site is down

Last updated September 2026

UptimeRobot checks a site every few minutes and emails when it fails. If the failure happens overnight, the email waits. A call does not.

Setting it up

1. Open alert contacts. In the UptimeRobot dashboard go to My Settings → Alert Contacts (newer accounts: Integrations → Add integration).
2. Add an E-mail contact. Choose E-mail as the type, enter your Email2Phone address, and give it a friendly name such as "Phone call".
3. Confirm the verification email. UptimeRobot sends a confirmation to that address. Because Email2Phone converts inbound mail to a call, you will hear the verification message read aloud — or you can read it in your Email2Phone message history and click through from there.
4. Attach the contact to the monitors that matter. Edit each monitor and tick the new alert contact under "Select alert contacts to notify". Apply it to production monitors only.
5. Pause and resume a monitor to test. The quickest safe test is to point a throwaway monitor at a URL that returns an error and wait for the check to fire.

Which alerts should ring the phone

UptimeRobot subjects read "Monitor is DOWN: <name>" and "Monitor is UP: <name>". Filter on "is DOWN" to be called only for failures, and leave recoveries as email.

Filters are the whole game here. A phone call is worth using precisely because it is rare — if everything calls you, nothing does. Most people end up with one or two filters and leave the rest of their notifications as email.

A filter is one condition and one action:

• If From, To, CC, Subject orBody — equals, contains, begins, ends ormatches — your text.
• Then either ignore the message, or tick the phones to call. One filter can ring several people.

Anything no filter excludes goes to your default number, so you can start with "everything calls me" and tighten from there.

UptimeRobot does offer voice-call alerts on its higher tiers. Using Email2Phone instead keeps the calls on a plan you control and works the same way across every other tool you monitor with.

What happens when the call comes

• Your phone rings and a voice reads the alert aloud — press 1 for the header, 2 for the body.
• You have to acknowledge it. Press 8 to save, 7 to delete or 5 to record a spoken reply. Until somebody presses one of those, the alert counts as undelivered.
• Not acknowledged? Email2Phone leaves voicemail if you enabled that, or calls back at 5, 15, 30, 60 and once more at 60 minutes, and keeps the message in your online history.
• Ring several numbers at once or one after another, and choose whether the escalation stops as soon as somebody acknowledges or continues until everyone has been called.
• A burst of alerts is one call, not one per email — Email2Phone tells you how many messages are waiting, so a tool that fires 80 notifications in two minutes rings you once.
• Quiet hours are set per phone number, so an alert can reach a mobile overnight and a desk phone during the day. Planned maintenance? Suspend delivery from the account settings.
• Replay anything later by dialing in — access numbers in the US, Canada and UK, free on every plan.

What it costs, wherever you are

Email2Phone calls any phone in any country. Plans start at $10/month for 40 call credits, and a minute costs 1 credit to the US and Canada and 1–6 credits elsewhere — most alert calls are well under a minute either way. An admin routing only genuine outages to a call typically stays inside the Basic plan.Check the rate for your own number with the calculator.

UptimeRobot questions

Other tools that work the same way

Email2Phone works with anything that can send an email, so the pattern above applies far beyond this one tool.

• Nagios
• Zabbix
• PRTG Network Monitor
• Synology NAS
• Microsoft 365 / Outlook
• Temperature & freezer sensors
• See all integrations