About the Acme Pulse 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.

Almost always we just read one page. We follow redirects, up to five hops, so that a check lands where a browser would. We do not crawl: we never follow links out of a page, and we never index anything.

Two things happen only when the person who set up the monitor asked for them. If they are watching a form - a contact form, say - we submit it on the schedule they chose, with the content they supplied. And if they gave us a username and password for the page, we send it. In both cases that is the site's own owner testing their own site.

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. A check is one request, plus any redirects it has to follow. If somebody has set up several checks against the same address, those can go out together, so you may see two or three requests in the same second rather than one.

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.