· Updated
Why I Built Pro Weather
By Lennart · Hands-on guides from the people building the platform
If you own a Davis weather station, you have probably looked for a way to put your data online, and found that every option asks you to become a system administrator first. I went through all of them. This is what each one actually cost me, and why I ended up building something different.
This guide is part of the weather station data glossary, the index to the whole weather-data series.
What are the options for putting a Davis station online?
There are four established paths, and I tried all of them before writing a line of code.
The first is WeatherLink.com, which is the cloud dashboard Davis gives every station owner for free. It works, it is reliable, and it is completely locked to Davis's design. You cannot change the layout, add your own branding, or put it on your own domain. It is a page about your station rather than a site that belongs to you. I cover the trade-off in detail in WeatherLink.com vs Pro Weather.
The second is self-hosted weather software such as WeeWX or CumulusMX. Both are genuinely good programs written by people who care about meteorology, and both are thoroughly documented: WeeWX has a full user guide and Cumulus has an extensive community wiki. Read either one and the shape of the commitment becomes clear. Both need a computer or Raspberry Pi running all day and all night, every day, forever.
The third is PHP weather templates, the long-running family of community-built site designs you upload to a web host. They look impressive in screenshots. Then you are dealing with FTP uploads, broken scripts, and cron jobs that stop working for no reason.
The fourth is a community network such as Weather Underground or CWOP, which happily accepts your data but gives you a page on their site, not one on yours.
| Path | What it costs you | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|
| WeatherLink.com | Nothing | Locked design, no custom domain, history paywalled |
| WeeWX / CumulusMX | A machine running 24/7 | Pi goes offline, SD card corrupts, you are the sysadmin |
| PHP templates | Web hosting plus setup time | FTP uploads fail silently, cron jobs stop |
| Community networks | Nothing | The page belongs to them, not to you |
What actually went wrong?
I spent more time fixing things than actually looking at my weather data. That is the honest summary, and the specific failures were always the same three.
Uploads failed silently. An FTP push that stops working does not send you an email. You find out days later when you notice the site has been showing Tuesday's numbers since Tuesday.
The machine was a single point of failure. A Raspberry Pi sitting on a shelf is a server with no redundancy, no monitoring, and no one on call. A power cut, a kernel update, or a full disk takes your website down with it.
And the history kept disappearing. This is the one that stung. On the free WeatherLink Basic plan your station's readings are recorded but your history sits behind the paywall. On a self-hosted setup, your entire archive lives on one SD card, and SD cards wear out. Either way the long-term record I actually cared about, the thing that makes a weather station interesting after year one, was the least safe part of the whole setup.
The tools were powerful under the hood, but using them felt like stepping back in time. I wanted something that just worked.
What does Pro Weather do differently?
Pro Weather is a hosted weather website service that reads your Davis station through the WeatherLink API and runs the site for you. You paste in an API key and get a website. There is no server to rent, no software to install, and nothing to maintain.
Three decisions came directly out of the failures above.
It stores everything, forever. Pro Weather polls your station every 10 minutes and archives every reading in its own database. Your charts, records, and almanac keep growing from the day you connect, independently of what Davis retains. This is the part that mattered most to me, and it is why the service works fully on the free Basic plan: you do not need a Davis subscription to have a permanent history.
There is no machine you have to keep alive. The polling, the storage, and the site itself all run as a hosted service. There is no Pi on a shelf, no SD card, and no FTP.
The site is genuinely yours. You get your own domain with automatic SSL, a clean interface that works on any device, and a layout you can configure rather than one you have to accept.
Who is this actually for?
Not everyone. If you enjoy running WeeWX, tuning your own skin, and having complete control over every part of the stack, self-hosting is a legitimately better fit and you should keep doing it. I say so plainly in Pro Weather vs WeeWX.
Pro Weather is for the owner who wants the website without the infrastructure. If you have ever restored a corrupted SD card, re-uploaded a template by hand, or discovered that your site froze a week ago, you are the person I built this for.
What started as a personal project to scratch my own itch is now a service for anyone with a Davis station who wants a website that looks as good as their hardware.
Common questions
Do I need a paid WeatherLink plan?
No. Pro Weather reads current conditions through the API and stores everything itself, so your history builds forward from the day you connect. The free Basic plan is enough.
What happens to the history I already have?
Anything Davis still holds for your station can be read in when you connect. Beyond that, Pro Weather builds your archive forward from day one, which is why connecting sooner is better than later.
Can I still upload to Weather Underground or CWOP?
Yes. Publishing onward to the community networks is built in, so you can keep contributing to Weather Underground and CWOP while your own site stays the canonical home for your data.
Is this just a hosted CumulusMX?
No. CumulusMX is software you run; Pro Weather is a service that runs for you. The comparison is laid out properly in Pro Weather vs CumulusMX.