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Status

Whether SparrowMap is up, and what to do if someone says it is not.

Right now

Check again

“It says the site is blocked”

A page saying access to this website is blocked is not coming from here. It is produced by something between you and us, and it is shown before the request leaves your device or your network. This server never sees it happen, which is exactly why it cannot tell you anything about whether the site is real, up, or safe.

The usual causes, in the order we actually see them:

1. A VPN or DNS filtering app. On iPhone these show a VPN badge in the status bar even when they are only filtering DNS. They block by category, and a site about government vehicles is an easy category to catch.
2. Parental controls or “web protection” on the phone, the router, or bundled with antivirus.
3. A school, work or guest network. These filter far more aggressively than a home connection.
4. A carrier content filter, which some prepaid plans turn on by default.

Three checks, about thirty seconds:

1. Turn the VPN or filtering app off and reload.
2. Switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data (or the other way round). If it works on one and not the other, the network is the filter.
3. Try a different DNS such as 1.1.1.1. SparrowMap resolves on every major resolver including the filtered ones (Cloudflare Family, Quad9, OpenDNS, AdGuard), so if yours does not answer, yours is filtering it.

If it still fails after all three, we want to know. That would be a real fault and not a filter. Say what you saw and roughly where you are, at [email protected]. We cannot look it up for you: this project keeps no record of who visits, which is a deliberate choice and the reason we have to ask.

What it costs to run

Two servers and the domain, $366.32 a month. The server figures are read off the hosting console per machine: a 32 GB, eight-core machine in Helsinki at $162.99 does almost all of it, as it serves this site, holds the database, takes every camera upload, and reads several thousand public traffic cameras on a cycle; a smaller reader in Virginia at $37.49 reads American cameras from inside the country. The domain is $165.84, paid directly rather than through the hosting console. Certificates are free. Nobody is paid, and there is no advertising on any page of this site.

The two camera machines were only started on 15 August and the host does not invoice until a full month has passed, so those two are the console's stated monthly price rather than a bill that has actually arrived.

If you want to help with the bill: buymeacoffee.com/sparrowmap. That goes to a person, not a foundation — it pays the two invoices above. There is no account to make, nothing is tracked back to you, and nothing on SparrowMap works differently if you do or do not.

What this page is not

It is not a claim that the site can never be down. It is a live read of this server at the moment you loaded it, so it can be wrong the moment after. The numbers above come from /api/health and /api/stats on this same machine, and anyone can fetch them directly rather than take this page's word for it.