Your website going offline is inevitable. Hardware fails. Software has bugs. Networks have outages. The question is not whether it will happen but how quickly you will know about it.
The Cost of Undetected Downtime
Every minute your website is offline is a minute where visitors cannot become customers. For an e-commerce site generating $10,000 per day in revenue, that is $6.94 per minute. Without active monitoring, downtime is discovered either by staff noticing it during business hours or by a client emailing to say the site is not loading. By the time you hear about it, you may have hours of downtime behind you.
What Uptime Monitoring Does
Uptime monitoring services make periodic requests to your website from multiple locations globally. If the site fails to respond, the service sends an alert via SMS, email or push notification. You know within minutes of the outage beginning, regardless of when it happens.
What to Monitor
HTTP availability catches total outages. Response time monitoring identifies degradation before it becomes an outage. Content checking verifies that expected content is actually present, not just a server error page returning 200. SSL certificate expiry monitoring prevents an avoidable outage from an expired certificate.
Tools Worth Using
UptimeRobot offers free monitoring for up to 50 sites at 5-minute intervals. Better Uptime and Freshping offer more granular intervals on paid plans. Our hosting plans include a 99.9% uptime SLA. Get started.
