If your website goes down at 2 a.m., you want to know before your customers and before search engines do. Repeated downtime hurts sales and can hurt your Google rankings too.
How uptime monitoring works
A monitor requests your website from outside your server every few minutes. If it gets an error or no answer, it tries again. If the problem continues, it sends you an alert, and sends another when the site is back.
What good monitoring includes
- Frequent checks: every 1 to 5 minutes for important sites.
- A retry before alerting, so a single network blip does not wake you up.
- Email (or SMS/WhatsApp) alerts to someone who will actually act on them.
- A recovery message, so you know when the problem is over and how long it lasted.
- History, so you can see uptime over 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days.
- Checks from outside your own network. A monitor running on the same server cannot tell you the server is dead.
Common causes of downtime
- Expired hosting, domain or SSL certificate (check yours with our SSL analyzer and DNS tool).
- Server overload, or running out of disk space or memory.
- A bad update to a plugin, theme or application.
- DNS problems or an unreachable database.
- Attacks and compromises (see how to tell if your site was hacked).
What to do when you get an alert
- Open the site yourself on mobile data to confirm it is down for everyone.
- Check your host's status page and your hosting panel.
- Look at the latest change: an update, deployment or DNS edit. Roll it back.
- Contact your host or developer with the exact time and error.
Let us watch it for you
Quepath monitors client websites around the clock and alerts you the moment something breaks, then helps fix it. Contact us to get started.