Nobody finds out their website is down by visiting it. They find out when a customer can’t buy, can’t book, or can’t find the phone number — and by then, the damage is done.
Uptime monitoring is the fix: a system that checks your site every minute or two, around the clock, and alerts a human the moment something breaks.
What good monitoring actually checks
- HTTP status — is the site returning 200, or 500?
- Response time — is it slow before it’s broken? Trending slowness usually precedes a crash
- SSL certificate — expiry is on a fixed schedule; monitoring catches it 30 days out, not when the browser warns customers
- Content — is the page actually rendering the content users expect, not an error page that still returns 200?
- Scheduled jobs — backups, cron jobs, and certificate renewals that silently stop running
How fast should you be alerted?
The industry rule of thumb is under 5 minutes for commercial sites. If a check fails twice in a row, a real person should know immediately.
More important than the alert is what happens next: who fixes it, how fast, and what the fix is. An alert at 3 AM that goes to an inbox nobody reads until Monday is worse than no monitoring at all — it’s a false sense of security.
The part monitoring can’t do alone
Monitoring tells you the site is down. It doesn’t tell you why — and it certainly doesn’t fix the root cause so it stops happening. That’s why we pair monitoring with maintenance: checks catch the problem, a human fixes it, and the report documents what broke and why.
What we consider good numbers
| Metric | Good | Acceptable |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime | 99.9%+ | 99.5% |
| Alert time | < 5 min | < 15 min |
| SSL monitoring | 30-day warning | manual check |
Should you DIY it?
Free tiers of monitoring tools exist and are better than nothing. But someone still has to (a) set it up correctly, (b) respond to alerts, and (c) fix what’s found. If you have a reliable person for all three, DIY away. If not, that’s literally the job description — see our pricing and request a free audit to see what your site actually needs.