Uptime monitoring
A service that checks your website automatically, often every few minutes, and sends an alert when it stops responding or shows an error.
Uptime monitoring is an automated check on your website. A monitoring service visits your site at regular intervals from outside, and if the site doesn’t respond, shows an error, or takes too long, it sends an alert by email, text or chat.
“Uptime” means the time your site is available. “Downtime” is when it isn’t.
Why it matters to a small business
Without monitoring, you usually learn your site is down when a customer tells you, or not at all. A site that’s down on a busy evening or weekend loses calls, bookings and orders. Monitoring means someone finds out quickly and can act.
Good monitoring checks more than whether the home page loads:
- Error pages, like a white screen or database error, which can still count as “responding”.
- Important pages, such as contact, booking or checkout.
- SSL certificate expiry, before it causes a warning. See SSL/TLS certificate.
- Domain expiry.
- Unexpected changes, which can be a sign of hacking or malware.
Example
A restaurant’s site goes down late on a Friday because a plugin update fails on the server. The monitor alerts within minutes. The update is rolled back from a backup, and the online ordering page is working again before most of the weekend rush.
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