Do you monitor downtimes?

[Cedric]

As webmasters, we all know that website downtime can be a major issue for our users and ultimately, our business. But do you actively monitor downtime on your website?

Some webmasters might argue that monitoring downtime is not necessary if you have a reliable hosting provider. Others might argue that even the most reliable hosting providers can experience downtime, and it's important to be proactive in identifying and addressing any issues.

Personally, I believe that monitoring downtime is essential for any website, regardless of the hosting provider. It allows you to quickly identify any issues and address them before they become major problems.

So, what are your thoughts? Do you actively monitor downtime on your website, and if so, how do you go about it? And if you don't monitor downtime, why not? Let's discuss!

I use Uptime Robot which sends me emails immediately when my server goes offline which it did today because of a 500 internal server error. It only took 5 minutes but I was notified nonetheless.

 

[Arantor]

Yup, monitoring downtime is always good. There's a variety of choices depending on what you need - Uptime Robot is a good choice, StatusCake can be, at work we use Uptime.com to monitor sites. In the latter case we specifically use it for dumping alerts into a Slack channel when we're actively online and whoever's looking after them out of hours will get emails for them if there's a problem.

Fortunately, we haven't had a period of downtime of more than a few minutes for any service for a while, and whenever it does, it's so far always been the fault of the upstream networks. We don't monitor the staging sites (ever) and we battle test everything in staging before it goes to production so we don't usually have downtime caused by production failures, not even deployment procedures which are automated.

 

[Uncrowned]

I do and I use updown.io to monitor it. I can't say they are better or worse, but they are cheap and I can reduce my usage really easily. I find downtime tracking very useful as an admin is only getting a very small picture of their website's health with the hours they are on per week and the area they live in.

 

[Matt C.]

I’ve never had a big enough forum where monitoring downtime is an issue. Maybe in the future.

 

[timewo]

The ad networks I use are monitoring the websites,and if there is any problem, they immediately notify me so that I can take corrective action and ensure that the websites are available.

 

[MrChris]

I use uptime robot as well as wordpress plugin from wpmu which does uptime monitoring as well seems to work out really well. I do it because I like to make sure all my sites are offline and like to be notified the second my site goes offline.