About the Acme monitoring bot

If you found this page in your server logs: our bot is checking a website on behalf of the person who owns it. Somebody asked us to tell them when their site stops working, and to do that we request one page every few minutes.

We only read pages. We never submit forms, never follow links, never log in and never index anything. If you want the checks to stop, ask whoever set up the monitor - we cannot identify them from an IP address alone.

How to identify us

Every request carries this exact User-Agent:

AcmeMonitor/1.0 (+https://acmepulse.com/bot)

And comes from one of these addresses:

The User-Agent alone proves nothing - anyone can send that string. Match on the IP address if the distinction matters to you.

How to allow us

Cloudflare

Security → WAF → Tools → IP Access Rules. Add each address above with the action "Allow", scoped to your website.

Nginx

geo $um_bot {
    default        0;
    157.180.46.41/32  1;
    2a01:4f9:c010:c445::1/32  1;
}

# Skip rate limiting for the monitor
limit_req_status 429;
map $um_bot $limit_key { 0 $binary_remote_addr; 1 ""; }

Apache (.htaccess)

<RequireAny>
    Require all granted
    Require ip 157.180.46.41
    Require ip 2a01:4f9:c010:c445::1
</RequireAny>

WordPress security plugins

Wordfence: Firewall → Allowlisted IPs. iThemes/Solid Security: Settings → Global Settings → Allowlist. Add the addresses above.

How often we check

Between once every 30 seconds and once every 30 minutes, depending on what the site owner chose. Each check is a single request. We respect timeouts and never run concurrent requests against the same address.

robots.txt

Uptime checks are requested by the site owner for their own site, so they are not crawling and we do not consult robots.txt for them. We are not a search engine and we store no page content beyond what is needed to answer "did this respond correctly".

Report a problem

If our bot is causing you trouble, get in touch and we will look into it the same day.