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.
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, so browsers warn visitors the connection isn't secure instead of showing your site. On a site that uses HSTS, visitors can't click past that warning at all |
| 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 respond to an uptime alert and begin investigating the same business day. Truly urgent issues (complete site failure, security incidents) go to the front of the queue.
Our monitoring runs continuously, but we don't offer after-hours or weekend support. Alerts that arrive outside business hours are picked up at the start of the next business day.
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 setup is immune to downtime, whatever figure is advertised. The goal is to detect and resolve issues quickly to minimize the impact on your business.
Common questions
Will I be notified when my site goes down?
Yes. We'll contact you to let you know what happened, especially if there was meaningful downtime. For brief blips that resolve quickly, we may not contact you unless there's something to report.
Can I set up my own uptime alerts?
Yes. UptimeRobot, for example, has a free plan with a 5-minute checking interval that can email you when your site goes down. SMS and voice-call credits aren't included on the free plan; free and paid users buy them separately as a one-off purchase. Check UptimeRobot's plans page for what each plan includes today. We still manage monitoring on our end, but it's fine to have your own alerts too. Just be aware that some brief blips may trigger notifications that resolve before you even see them.
What if my site keeps going down repeatedly?
Frequent downtime usually indicates an underlying problem, often with hosting, traffic capacity, or software. We'll investigate the pattern and recommend a lasting fix, which might mean upgrading your hosting plan or addressing a software issue.
My site looks broken but it's technically 'up', is that covered?
Uptime monitoring checks that your site responds, not that it looks correct. If your site is accessible but broken visually, that's a different kind of problem. See How to report a bug effectively for how to flag visual or functional issues.
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- Our full guideWebsite maintenance: costs and risksWhat upkeep costs, and what goes wrong without it.
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