Website uptime monitoring is the automated, recurring practice of checking whether your site or server responds correctly from the outside world — typically every 1–5 minutes from one or more geographic locations. If a check fails, the monitoring service alerts you (email, SMS, Slack, etc.) so you can respond before most visitors notice.
Why it matters
Manually checking "is my site up?" doesn’t scale, and outages are often silent to the owner — your own browser cache or ISP may still resolve the site fine while the rest of the world sees an error. Automated monitoring closes that blind spot.
What a good setup checks
- HTTP status code (200 vs. 4xx/5xx)
- Response time / latency trends
- SSL certificate validity
- DNS resolution
- Optional: specific keyword or element present on the page
FAQ
How often should checks run?
Every 1–5 minutes is standard for production sites; less frequent checks simply mean longer undetected outages.
Is one monitoring location enough?
No — checking from multiple regions avoids false alarms caused by a single network path being down rather than your actual server.