Of everything you could do for your website this week, this has the best ratio of benefit to effort. Uptime monitoring costs very little, takes fifteen minutes, and changes the worst-case outage from days to minutes.
The arithmetic
A site breaks at 6pm on Friday. Nobody notices until Monday at 9am. That is 63 hours offline.
The same fault, with monitoring, alerts someone at 6:02pm. Even if the fix waits until Saturday morning, that is a 14-hour outage — and often it is thirty minutes.
The technical severity was identical. The cost differed by a factor of four, entirely because of when someone found out.
Our guide to what website downtime actually costs covers the money side. The short version is that for most businesses, one avoided weekend outage pays for years of monitoring.
How it works
A service requests your website from an external location on a schedule. If the request fails or the response looks wrong, it alerts you.
Being external matters. Monitoring that runs on your own server cannot tell you the server is down — a surprisingly common design flaw in DIY setups.
What to actually monitor
This is where most setups fall short. Checking that your homepage returns HTTP 200 catches complete outages and misses a great deal else.
Content checks, not just status codes
A site can return 200 while being completely broken. A database error page, a maintenance screen, or a hacked page all return 200 quite happily.
Configure the check to look for specific text that should appear — your company name, a phrase from the footer. If that text disappears, something is wrong even though the server responded.
This single change catches stuck maintenance mode, database connection errors, and defacement, none of which a status-code check would notice.
More than the homepage
Homepages are often cached and served even when the rest of the site is failing. Monitor a page that requires a database query, plus your most commercially important page — checkout, booking, or contact.
Certificate expiry
Most services check this and it is worth enabling. An expired certificate makes a perfectly working site show a full-page browser warning. Alert at 14 days, not on the day.
Domain expiry
Less commonly offered and worth finding. A lapsed domain is among the most painful and most preventable outages there is, and renewal notices routinely go to an inbox nobody reads.
Response time
Gradual slowdown often precedes an outage. A site that normally responds in 400ms and starts taking three seconds is telling you something before it fails.
Getting the alerts right
An alert that arrives where nobody sees it is the same as no alert.
Not email alone. If the outage is at 2am, email is read at 8am. Use SMS, a phone call, or a push notification for genuine outages.
Confirm before alerting. A single failed check is often a network blip. Good services re-check from a different location before alerting. Without that, you get false alarms and start ignoring them.
More than one recipient. One person is on holiday, has a flat phone, or is in a meeting. Two or three people is meaningfully more reliable.
Alert on recovery too. Knowing it came back at 6:20pm without your intervention is useful information — it usually indicates a resource problem rather than a crash.
How often to check
Every minute is ideal for a site that generates revenue. Every five minutes is fine for most business sites. Anything less frequent than fifteen minutes undermines the point.
Most services offer one-minute checks on paid tiers and five-minute on free ones. For a brochure site the free tier is genuinely adequate.
The false alarm problem
The main way monitoring fails is not technical. It is that people switch it off.
If your monitor alerts three times a week for blips that resolve themselves, everyone stops reading the alerts, and the real outage arrives looking like the others.
Fixing it: require two or three consecutive failures before alerting, verify from multiple locations, set a sensible timeout — some pages genuinely take a few seconds — and suppress alerts during planned maintenance.
The aim is that an alert always means something. If it does not, you will train yourself to ignore it.
What it will not tell you
Uptime monitoring answers one question: is the site responding correctly right now?
It says nothing about whether the site has been compromised, whether your forms are delivering email, whether a page is broken on mobile, or whether the checkout works for real customers. A site can be up, fast, and quietly hacked.
That is a different job, covered by file integrity monitoring and server-side scanning. The two are complementary rather than alternatives.
The form check worth adding
Since uptime monitoring will not catch it: a contact form that stops delivering email is the most expensive silent failure a website has, and it produces no downtime at all.
Add a manual weekly test — submit your own form and confirm the email arrives. It takes a minute. Our guide to contact forms not sending email covers why this happens more often than people expect.
Setting it up today
- Choose a monitoring service — free tiers are fine to start
- Monitor your homepage plus one database-driven page and your key conversion page
- Add a content check for text that should always appear
- Enable certificate expiry alerts at 14 days
- Set alerts to reach a phone, not just an inbox
- Add a second recipient
- Require two consecutive failures before alerting
- Test it by deliberately breaking something on staging
That last step is the one people skip, and it is how you find out the alert goes to an address nobody monitors.
If you would rather it was someone else's job
Monitoring tells you there is a problem. Someone still has to fix it, and at 2am on a Sunday that is the harder half.
Our managed website plans include uptime monitoring with real alerts and someone who responds — so the alert leads to a fix rather than to a stressful morning.
Get in touch and tell us what happened during your last outage. How you found out is usually the most revealing part.
Get Shielded
We build, host, secure and monitor business websites — cleaning up hacks and keeping sites online for clients across the UK, USA, Australia and the UAE.
