How To Monitor Your Website’s Uptime And Get Alerts If It’s Down

Do you know if your website is up and running right now? Do you manually check every few hours (or days) to see if it’s running? Or do you wait for one of your clients or customers to contact you, telling you they can’t access it?

Both of these approaches are obviously not good. Read on to learn how to monitor your website and get alerted automatically as soon as there is a problem.

If you’re using SecureWP hosting, you can stop worrying

First, if you’re using our hosting services, you can stop reading here. We already monitor every website we host and know immediately if there is a problem.

What can cause a website to be down or not respond?

There can be several reasons for this, some are server problems, and others are issues with the website itself, for example a misconfiguration or a broken update.

A website can also be down because it’s been hacked, so make sure you’re properly protected against bad actors and malicious code.

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is one of the world’s most popular uptime monitoring tools. Their basic account with a 5 minute monitoring interval is free to use.

For many websites, this interval is sufficient. If you’re running a mission-critical website, such as a busy e-com site, you probably want more frequent uptime checks.

Better Stack Uptime

Better Stack Uptime is an uptime monitoring tool I really like. The UI is really slick, up to 10 websites can be monitored for free, and they’ve got an app that will alert you with push notifications. You can also set up alerts via email, which I prefer.

The free plan lets you set a monitoring interval of 3 minutes, which is sufficient for most applications. You can see uptimes for the last day, week, month and year. Another very cool feature is you can see response times from 4 different continents – North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.

Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma differs from the other uptime monitoring tools as it’s a self-hosted solution. This means you install it on your own server or local computer and run it as a server. This means your server must always be connected to the Internet for the monitoring to work.

Now, why would I set this up myself when there are other options, you might ask. Well, the first reason is that is it open source and completely free to use, no matter how many sites you want to monitor.

The second reason is that it is extremely configurable and has a ton of customizable options. The choices you have for receiving alerts are insane. You can get them on email, SMS, Telegram, Slack, Discord, just about any other chat app or service you can think of.

It is also extremely simple to install. It runs in a Docker, so you can basically just copy and paste one command, and you are up and running if you’re using Linux.

The downside is that you have to run Uptime Kuma on another server than your current VPS or it makes no sense at all.

Conclusion

So which one do I like best you may ask? As a privacy advocate I do very much like the open-source solution of Uptime Kuma. I like the configurability, the notification options and ability to set the monitoring interval as I please.

However, if you just want a simple solution that works out of the box, either UptimeRobot or Better Stack Uptime will suit your needs fine. Of these, I find that Better Stack Uptime has the best UI and options.

If you have any questions or need help setting monitoring, feel free to reach out.