What is uptime monitoring and why every website needs it

The problem

Websites go down for many reasons: an expired certificate, a full disk, a broken deploy, a DNS change. Without monitoring, you usually hear about it from an angry customer.

How uptime monitoring works

A monitoring service requests your website or API from the outside at a fixed interval — for example every minute — and checks the answer:

• Status code: did the server answer with 200 OK?
• Content: does the page still contain the text you expect?
• Speed: did it answer fast enough?

When a check fails, it is repeated to confirm the problem. Only then are you alerted, so a single network blip doesn't wake you up.

Which checks you need

1. HTTP checks for your website and API endpoints.
2. Keyword checks for pages that can return "200 OK" while showing an error.
3. SSL and domain expiry so nothing expires by surprise.
4. Heartbeat checks for cron jobs and backups that run in the background.

Tell your customers

A public status page shows what's working and what isn't. It reduces support tickets during an incident and builds trust the rest of the time.