Web & SEO
What is uptime monitoring?
Uptime monitoring is an automated service that checks a site at regular intervals from outside it and alerts you when it stops responding correctly.
New to Bolt? Sign up free.
Technical definition
A monitor requests a URL on a schedule, commonly every one to five minutes, from one or more geographic locations, and evaluates the response. Checks range from a simple status code test to keyword checks that confirm expected content is present, and transaction checks that walk through a multi-step flow such as login or checkout.
Uptime is expressed as a percentage over a period. The difference between 99.9 and 99.99 percent is roughly 43 minutes of downtime per month against four.
In plain terms
A service that visits your website every couple of minutes to make sure it is still there, and texts you if it is not.
The alternative is finding out when a customer tells you, which is later and more expensive.
Why it matters
Outages are not the only thing worth catching. A site that returns a page but shows a database error, an expired certificate warning, or an empty product list is technically responding and practically broken. Keyword checks catch those, which a plain status check does not.
For a small business the useful setup is modest and mostly free. Monitor the homepage and the one page that makes money, whether that is checkout or the booking form. Add a keyword check so that a broken page counts as down. Set alerts to reach a phone rather than an inbox. And monitor certificate expiry, since an expired certificate takes a site out of service just as completely as a server failure and gives more warning than any other outage.
