How most owners find out
A client phones to say the website is not working. Or mentions it at the appointment. Or a friend messages a screenshot of an error. By then the site has been down for hours, sometimes days, and every person who searched for you in that time found an error page and went elsewhere.
Websites go down. Hosting has outages, certificates expire, updates fail, domains lapse, servers fill up. The question is not whether it will happen but who finds out first. Uptime monitoring is the answer to that question, and it costs almost nothing.
What it is
A service somewhere else on the internet loads your website every few minutes, from several locations, and checks that it answers correctly. When it does not, the service alerts a person. That is the whole idea, and the free tier of any reputable monitoring service does it.
Every care plan should include it. Many do not, or include a version that checks the wrong thing.
What "up" should mean
A naive monitor checks that the server responds. That misses most real outages. A site can respond and still be broken. The checks that matter:
The home page returns a success response, not an error code. Basic, and necessary.
The page contains something it should. Your business name in the title, say. A server that responds with a blank page or a hosting company's "account suspended" notice is responding, and a content check catches it.
The certificate is valid and not about to expire. A monitor that checks the certificate's expiry date warns you a week before the padlock disappears, rather than after.
The booking page loads, separately from the home page. It is the page that earns; it should be watched on its own.
Response time. Not just up or down, but how long the page took. A site that has slowed from one second to eight is not down, but it is losing people, and a trend alert catches decay before customers do.
From more than one location. A check from a single place gives false alarms when that place has a network hiccup. Two or three locations agreeing means it is real.
How alerts should work
An alert that goes to an email nobody reads on a weekend is not an alert. Sensible routing:
- First alert by email and by a message to the person responsible, after two consecutive failed checks a few minutes apart, to avoid false alarms from a single blip.
- Escalation if it is still down after fifteen or thirty minutes, to a second person or a phone call.
- Recovery notice when the site comes back, with the duration of the outage, so the record exists.
On a care plan, the alert goes to the studio, who investigates and fixes, and tells you what happened. You should hear about an outage from the person fixing it, not from a customer.
What it does not do
Monitoring tells you the site is down. It does not tell you why, and it does not fix it. That is the human's job, and it is why monitoring belongs inside a care plan rather than as a standalone subscription: the alert is only useful if someone acts on it within the hour.
It also does not catch the failures that happen while the page is up: the form that does not send, the booking that does not sync. Those need their own periodic tests, which is a separate line in a good plan.
What it costs
The monitoring service itself: free for a basic check every five minutes, a few dollars a month for more locations, shorter intervals and certificate checks. The cost is not the tool. The cost is a human being on the receiving end who will act, which is what the monthly fee of a care plan pays for.
Setting it up yourself
If you have no care plan, do this today: sign up to a free monitoring service, add your home page and your booking page, turn on the certificate check, and point the alerts at a phone that gets looked at. You will not be able to fix most outages yourself, but you will know about them in five minutes instead of two days, and you can call someone.
On our care plans, monitoring covers the home page, the booking page and the certificate, checked from multiple locations, with alerts to us and a note to you. "We know before you do if it goes down" is on the plan page because it is the thing owners most often say they wish they had had.