Going on holiday, migrating a server, or in the middle of a DNS cutover that will fire an alert on every change? You can stop alerts at four different levels. They are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one can cost you the record of what happened while you were away.
The decision in one line
Pausing delivery keeps monitoring running and only stops the messages. Pausing monitoring stops the checks themselves, and there is no history for that period afterwards. Prefer the first unless you have a specific reason not to.
1. Turn off a delivery destination
The cleanest pause, and the one to reach for by default.
- Open Settings, then the Alerts tab.
- Find the destination in the list.
- Flip its toggle off.
Every destination has this toggle, email included. Monitoring carries on completely untouched: checks run, changes are detected, history accumulates, and your dashboard stays current. Only delivery to that destination stops.
What you give up: alerts that fire while a destination is off are not queued and re-sent when you turn it back on. Anything that happened is in the domain's history and on your dashboard, but it will not arrive in your inbox retroactively.
Good for: holidays, quiet hours on a Slack channel, muting a webhook while its receiver is being rebuilt.
Tip: if you are turning off email because it is too noisy rather than because you are away, narrow its alert-type filter instead. You keep the alerts that matter and lose only the ones you were going to skim past anyway. See customizing alert frequency.
2. Turn off a check type for one domain
If a specific kind of alert on a specific domain is the problem, switch off that check rather than the whole domain.
- Open the domain from your Portfolio.
- In its monitoring settings, toggle SSL Monitoring or DNS Monitoring off.
The domain keeps being checked for lifecycle and status changes; only that one check type stops.
Good for: a planned DNS migration where you know every record is about to change, or a domain that does not serve a website and will never have a certificate worth watching.
Remember to turn it back on after the migration. A permanently disabled DNS check on a domain you care about is a monitoring gap that looks exactly like a healthy domain.
3. Disable monitoring for a domain
The heaviest option. Find the domain in your Watchlist or Portfolio and toggle Monitoring off, either from the row or on the domain's detail page.
Nothing is checked at all: no lifecycle, no SSL, no DNS. No jobs are scheduled, no alerts can fire, and the domain stops counting toward the check volume on your plan.
What you give up: the history for that period. There is no record of what the domain's status was while monitoring was off, because nobody looked. When you turn it back on, the next check establishes a fresh baseline and the first DNS check after the gap is recorded as a baseline rather than a change, so a record edited during the pause will not be reported as a change afterwards.
Good for: a domain you have sold or let go and are not ready to delete.
Not good for: going on holiday. Use option 1.
4. Narrow a destination's alert filter
Not a pause, but usually the thing people actually wanted. From Settings → Alerts, open Manage on a destination and change which alert types it accepts.
This is how you keep a channel alive for the things that genuinely cannot wait while silencing the rest, and unlike a pause you cannot forget to undo it and discover months later that you have been running blind.
Your existing data is always safe
None of these options deletes anything. Historical checks, past alerts and domain records are all preserved, and re-enabling any of them resumes normal operation from the next scheduled check.