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 or Body — equals, contains, begins, ends or matches — 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.

The wider guide to how Email2Phone works — email to phone call alerts for uptime monitoring — covers filters, quiet hours and what happens when nobody picks up.

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 says a message is waiting. Press 1 to hear it, then 8 to save it, 7 to delete it or 5 to record a spoken reply; on a phone with voicemail switched off, nothing counts as delivered until someone does, and Email2Phone calls back, five times over three hours, if nobody does. A burst of alerts is one call, not one per email. Ringing several phones, quiet hours and dial-in replay are each covered in Help.

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