Uptime monitoring explained
How we know the moment your website goes offline — and what happens next.
"Uptime" refers to the time your website is online and accessible to visitors. When your site is unreachable — even briefly — that's called "downtime." This guide explains how we monitor uptime and what we do when a problem is detected.
Quick summary
We use automated monitoring tools that check your website every few minutes, around the clock. If your site goes offline, we get an alert immediately — often before you or your customers even notice. We investigate and work to get the site back online as fast as possible.
What uptime monitoring is
An uptime monitor works by visiting your website at regular intervals — every minute or few minutes — and checking that it responds correctly. If it doesn't get a valid response, it sends us an alert.
This happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including weekends and holidays. You don't have to check it yourself, and you don't have to rely on a customer telling you your site is down.
Why downtime happens
There are several common reasons a website goes offline:
| Cause | What it means |
|---|---|
| Hosting server issue | Your hosting provider has a problem with their servers |
| Traffic spike | Sudden surge in visitors overwhelms the server |
| Software crash | A bad update or conflict crashes a core component |
| Security attack | A DDoS attack or hack attempt takes the site offline |
| Domain or DNS issue | A lapse in domain renewal or a DNS misconfiguration |
| SSL certificate expiry | Your security certificate expires and browsers block access |
| Accidental deletion | A configuration file was accidentally removed |
Most causes are fixable quickly once identified.
What happens when your site goes down
Monitor detects the problem. Within minutes of the outage, the monitoring system detects that your site isn't responding.
We receive an alert. We get an immediate notification so we can start investigating.
We diagnose the cause. We check your hosting server status, recent changes, DNS, and error logs to identify what's wrong.
We fix the problem. Depending on the cause, we contact your host, roll back a change, or take another corrective action.
We confirm the site is back. The monitor confirms the site is responding again, and we do a quick check of the live site.
We let you know. We notify you of what happened, what caused it, and what we did to fix it.
Response times
We act fast
For care plan clients, we aim to acknowledge an uptime alert and begin investigating within a few hours during business hours. Truly urgent issues (complete site failure, security incidents) receive the fastest response we can provide.
For situations outside business hours, our monitoring still runs continuously. We'll address overnight alerts first thing in the morning, or sooner for critical situations.
What "99.9% uptime" means
You may have seen hosting providers advertise "99.9% uptime." That sounds nearly perfect, but it still means:
| Uptime % | Allowed downtime per year |
|---|---|
| 99% | ~3.6 days |
| 99.9% | ~8.7 hours |
| 99.99% | ~52 minutes |
No hosting provider can guarantee 100% uptime. The goal is to detect and resolve issues quickly to minimize the impact on your business.
Common questions
Related guides
- Why websites need maintenance
- Security monitoring explained
- When & how to request emergency support
- How to report a bug effectively
- What our care plan covers
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