Documentation

When a domain expires or a hosting bill goes unpaid, the registrar or host replaces the real website with a parking page or an “account suspended” stub — and serves it with HTTP 200 OK. Classic uptime monitoring sees the 200 and shows a green “UP”, while visitors see a dead site. PingZen recognises these placeholder pages and marks the monitor DOWN, so you find out before your customers do.

Zoom

What We Detect

How It Works

PingZen runs three independent, low-false-positive layers on every HTTP/HTTPS check:

1. Content fingerprints — the response body is normalised (tags stripped,   decoded) and matched against a curated list of high-precision parking and suspension phrases in English and Russian. Generic prose never trips it — only the exact registrar/host placeholder wording does.
2. For-sale hosts — a redirect or body pointing at a known parking marketplace (sedoparking.com, parkingcrew.net, bodis.com, dan.com, afternic.com, …).
3. Nameserver delegation — content-independent. PingZen resolves the domain’s authoritative nameservers and matches them against dedicated parking nameservers (Sedo, Bodis, ParkingCrew, Afternic, Dan, CashParking, …) and expired-domain nameservers. This catches for-sale and parked landers even when the page is rendered by JavaScript and exposes nothing in its HTML.

How It Looks in PingZen

• A “Stub Page” label appears on the affected check result.
• The monitor detail page shows a banner explaining it is a registrar parking / hosting-suspension placeholder, with advice to check domain renewal and hosting status.
• The monitor goes DOWN, opens an incident, and fires your configured alerts — exactly like any other outage.

Supported Providers

Enabling It

Detection is on by default for new and existing HTTP/HTTPS monitors. To turn it off for a specific monitor, open the monitor form and toggle off “Detect parking/stub pages” in the HTTP advanced options.

FAQ

Will a real website ever be flagged by mistake?

It is designed not to. The content layer matches only exact registrar/host placeholder wording (not generic phrases like “for sale” or “account suspended” used in normal text), and the nameserver layer matches only dedicated parking nameservers. A production audit across the live monitor base produced zero false positives.

My domain is parked at a Russian registrar — is it caught?

Yes, via the content layer. Russian registrars (REG.RU, nic.ru, Timeweb) serve their parking pages from shared nameservers, so the nameserver layer does not apply to them — the registrar’s parking page wording does the work instead.

Does it add an extra request to my site?

No extra HTTP request. The nameserver check is a lightweight DNS lookup, cached per domain, that runs alongside the regular check.