Changelog

Better Identification, More Developer Tools

This week at Pie.host, we made a small improvement to PieMonitor’s scraping bot and expanded our collection of developer tools with four new color conversion utilities.

These updates are focused on making our infrastructure easier to identify and giving developers a few more lightweight tools for everyday work.

🔍 PieMonitor Scraping Bot Now Identifies Itself

The PieMonitor scraping bot now sends a dedicated user-agent:

PieMonitor/1.0 (+https://piehost.com/piemonitor)

This makes PieMonitor traffic easier for website owners and infrastructure teams to identify in server logs, analytics, firewall rules, and other monitoring systems.

If you're inspecting incoming requests or want to distinguish monitoring traffic from regular visitors, the dedicated user-agent provides a straightforward way to recognize PieMonitor.

🎨 Four New Color Conversion Tools

We've also added four new tools for converting between common color formats:

HSL → RGB

Convert HSL color values into RGB values when working between design-oriented and display-oriented color representations.

HSV → RGB

Convert HSV values into RGB, useful when working with color pickers, graphics applications, and interfaces that represent colors using hue, saturation, and value.

RGB → HSL

Convert RGB values into HSL, making it easier to work with colors using hue, saturation, and lightness.

RGB → HSV

Convert RGB values into HSV for applications that use hue, saturation, and value as their color model.

Together, these additions make it easier to move between RGB, HSL, and HSV without writing a conversion function from scratch.

🧰 Small Improvements

This week's release is mostly about useful building blocks: better visibility into PieMonitor traffic and a larger set of simple tools for developers.

We're continuing to add practical utilities alongside Pie.host's realtime infrastructure and developer cloud products.

Try the new color tools and keep an eye out for next week's update.

Another Tuesday, another Pie.host update!

Last week we shipped improvements across PieMail and PieSocket, with a focus on making it easier to test outbound emails and giving teams more control over how long piesocket-server self-hosted message logs are retained.

The PieMail update makes cadence testing more practical, while PieSocket Server v4.7.7 (self-hosted) introduces daily log partitioning and configurable retention for deployments that generate large volumes of message data.

What We Shipped

Test Emails Directly From PieMail Cadences

Testing an automated email sequence should not require waiting for the cadence to reach a real contact.

You can now send a test email directly from your PieMail cadence settings. This lets you see the actual email you are about to send and verify that its content and formatting look right before the cadence reaches your contacts.

You can also select an existing contact when sending the test. Their information is used to populate the cadence's placeholders, making it possible to preview the email with realistic contact data instead of generic or empty variables.

This is particularly useful for emails containing personalization, dynamic contact attributes, or multiple placeholders where a simple static preview isn't enough.

PieSocket Server v4.7.7: Daily Log Rotation and Retention

PieSocket Server (self-hosted) v4.7.7 adds two configuration options for managing message log storage:

LOG_PARTITIONING=daily enables daily message log tables instead of keeping all logs in a single unbounded message_logs table. Daily tables follow the format message_logs_YYYY_MM_DD.

The second option, LOG_RETENTION_DAYS, lets operators automatically remove logs older than a specified number of days.

When daily partitioning is enabled, retention can remove entire daily tables rather than deleting individual rows. Without partitioning, matching rows are deleted directly from message_logs.

Both settings are optional. By default, partitioning is disabled and logs are retained indefinitely.

For deployments with high message volumes, this provides a more predictable way to manage log growth without requiring operators to manually clean up old data.

Small Improvements

This week's work continues a broader focus on giving developers more control over the infrastructure behind their applications, while making everyday product workflows easier to verify before they reach production.

For PieMail users, that means being able to validate personalized cadence emails before sending them. For PieSocket Server operators, it means having explicit controls over log organization and retention.

Try the latest PieMail improvements and PieSocket Server v4.7.7 in your next deployment.

See you next Tuesday

Another Tuesday, another Pie.host update!

Last week, we shipped two improvements to PieMail focused on making contact management and email cadences more powerful.

You can now make cadence decisions based on contact attributes, and programmatically update contacts through a new REST API endpoint.

Conditional Cadences

PieMail cadences can now use conditions based on contact attributes.

This gives you more control over what happens to a contact as they move through a cadence. For example, if a contact converts on your website while they're partway through a campaign, you can use their updated attributes to stop the cadence or route them through a different email flow.

This is particularly useful for lifecycle emails, onboarding sequences, and other automated campaigns where a contact's state can change after entering a cadence.

Update PieMail Contacts via API

We've also added a new API endpoint for updating PieMail contacts.

You can now update contact information programmatically as events happen in your application, keeping PieMail contact data in sync with your own systems.

The API documentation and details are available in the REST API section of your PieMail dashboard.

Small Improvements

Together, these updates give you more control over how PieMail contacts are managed and how automated email sequences respond to changes in contact data.

Give the new PieMail features a try and build more responsive email workflows.

Another Tuesday, another Pie.host update!

Last week, we continued improving PieMonitor, our per-minute uptime monitoring service for websites, databases, WebSockets, and other services.

This week's updates focus on giving you more visibility into your monitored infrastructure, not just whether something is up or down, but also whether the supporting pieces around it are approaching expiry.

What We Shipped

Public Status Pages for PieMonitor

PieMonitor now supports status pages for your monitors.

You can create a status page for a single monitor or group multiple monitors together. This gives you a simple way to share the current health of your services with your team, customers, or anyone who needs visibility into your infrastructure.

For example, if you're running an API, website, and WebSocket service, you can group those monitors into one status page and give users a single place to check whether everything is operational.

SSL & Domain Expiry Monitoring

PieMonitor can now keep an eye on two things that are easy to forget until they cause a problem: SSL certificates and domain registrations.

The monitor checks SSL certificate expiry and domain expiry so you can catch upcoming expirations before they turn into an outage.

This is particularly useful for websites and APIs where an expired certificate can suddenly make an otherwise healthy service inaccessible to users.

We Made a Horror Story 👻

We also made something a little different.

If you've ever wondered what happens when you don't monitor your infrastructure until it's too late, we created a short horror story for you.

It's fun, slightly painful, and unfortunately based on problems that can actually happen to production systems.

Check it out: PieMonitor Horror Story

Small Improvements

Alongside these updates, we continued making smaller improvements and fixes across Pie.host to keep the platform reliable and easier to use.

We're building PieMonitor around a simple idea: infrastructure problems are much easier to deal with when you know about them before your users do.

Try PieMonitor and see what you can catch before it becomes a production incident.

Another Tuesday, another Pie.host update!

Last week, we launched PieMonitor, a monitoring service for websites, WebSockets, Databases, TCP ports, and SMTP servers.

It checks your endpoints every minute and alerts you through Slack, Discord, or email when something goes down or becomes slow. You also get monitoring history and graphs, making it easier to understand uptime and spot recurring issues.

What We Shipped

PieMonitor

PieMonitor is now live for anyone who wants lightweight, straightforward monitoring without setting up a full monitoring stack.

You can monitor:

• Websites
• WebSocket endpoints
• TCP ports
• SMTP servers

Checks run every minute, with alerts sent when an endpoint becomes unavailable. Historical graphs also help you see how your services have performed over time.

Try PieMonitor at https://piehost.com/piemonitor.

Change Your Account Email

You can now change the email address associated with your Pie.host account directly.

This makes it easier to keep your account information up to date when your email address changes or you need to move an account to a different address.

Small Improvements

We also continued with the usual fixes and improvements across Pie.host to keep things reliable and easier to use.

Try PieMonitor and keep an eye on the services that matter to you.