Healthchecks recently gained a new feature: check auto-provisioning. When you send a ping request to a slug URL, and a check with the specified slug does not exist, Healthchecks can now automatically create the missing check. This feature requires opt-in: to use it, add a?create=1 query parameter to the ping URL.

When we make a request to your site to verify that your site is up, the response of your server will contain certain headers. We can verify that those headers contain the values you expect. If these expectations are not met, we'll consider your site as down. In the "Responses" section of the uptime settings page, you can specify which headers we should verify. You could add this expectation to ensure your page uses gzip compression.