Website monitoring, so you notice outages before your customers do
How uptime monitoring works, what it costs and what to watch out for when setting it up. For small businesses, freelancers and clubs.
A website can go down at any time: because of a server problem at your host, a broken update, an expired certificate or a domain that was not renewed. Without monitoring, you only find out when a customer calls, or never, because the customer simply goes to a competitor.
How monitoring works
A monitoring service requests your website at regular intervals, typically every one to five minutes. If it gets no response or an error, it checks again from a second location to avoid false alarms. If the outage is confirmed, you get a notification by email, app, text message or in a chat tool. As soon as the site is back up, you get an all-clear.
In principle, the service does the same as our website checker, only automatically and around the clock.
What you should monitor
Your home page. This is the foundation. If the page responds with an error code or not at all, you get an alert.
Important subpages. For an online shop, the shopping cart; for a business, the contact form or online booking. Sometimes the home page works while the crucial function behind it is broken.
Page content. Good services check whether a specific word appears on the page, such as your company name. That way you also notice when an error page or someone else’s page is served instead of your website.
SSL certificate. A warning two weeks before expiry gives you enough time to react. This is especially important because certificates are getting shorter lifetimes. More in SSL certificate expired.
Domain expiry. Some services also remind you when your domain needs to be renewed soon.
What it costs
For a single small website, free plans with a five-minute check interval are often enough. Paid plans usually cost between a few and a few dozen euros or dollars a month. In return you get shorter intervals, more monitored pages, SMS alerts and public status pages.
For a business that receives enquiries or orders through its website, it quickly pays off: a single unnoticed outage over a weekend usually costs more.
Tips for setting it up
- Monitor the right address. Enter the address your site finally ends up at, i.e. with
https://andwwwif you use it. Otherwise you only monitor the redirect. - Notify more than one person. If you are on holiday, someone else should be told.
- Don’t make it too sensitive. A brief one-minute hiccup is normal. Only alert after two or three failed checks, otherwise you will soon start ignoring the messages.
- Use a status page. Many services offer a public page where customers can see whether a known issue exists. That saves phone calls.
Monitoring does not replace maintenance
Monitoring tells you that something is broken, but not why. Regular updates, backups and good passwords prevent many outages in the first place. Our website security checklist for small businesses gives you an overview.