Setting up uptime monitoring for your website

Do you know when your website goes offline? With uptime monitoring, you are immediately alerted if your website is not reachable, so you can act quickly. At Theory7, we offer reliable hosting with high uptime, but setting up external monitoring gives you extra security and insight.

Why uptime monitoring is important

A website that is offline costs money and trust. Every minute that your webshop is unreachable, you miss potential sales. Additionally:

  • Customers get frustrated when they cannot reach your website
  • Search engines may rank you lower with frequent downtime
  • Your reputation can suffer damage

With monitoring, you know exactly when there is a problem, how long it lasted, and you can track uptime trends.

Free monitoring tools

There are excellent free tools available to monitor your website.

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is one of the most popular free monitoring services.

Setting up UptimeRobot:

  1. Go to uptimerobot.com and create a free account
  2. Click on Add New Monitor
  3. Select HTTP(s) as monitor type
  4. Enter your website URL (for example https://yourdomain.com)
  5. Set the check interval (free: every 5 minutes)
  6. Configure your alert contacts

Free features:

  • 50 monitors
  • Check every 5 minutes
  • Email alerts
  • Uptime statistics
  • Status page

Freshping

Freshping from Freshworks is another excellent free alternative.

Advantages of Freshping:

  • 50 free monitors
  • Check every minute (!)
  • Multiple locations worldwide
  • Integrated status page
  • Slack and webhook integrations

Setup:

  1. Go to freshping.io and register
  2. Click on Add Check
  3. Enter your website URL
  4. Choose the check locations
  5. Set up notifications

Other options

  • Pingdom: Professional tool with free trial
  • StatusCake: 10 free monitors
  • Better Uptime: Modern interface with free tier

Configuring alerts

The power of monitoring lies in the alerts. Configure your notifications carefully.

Email alerts

The most basic form of alerting. Make sure you:

  • Use an email address that you check regularly
  • Consider a separate email address for monitoring alerts
  • Alerts do not end up in spam (add the sender to your contacts)

At Theory7, you can easily create additional email addresses specifically for monitoring.

SMS alerts

For critical websites, SMS is a good addition:

  • You do not miss alerts when you are not at your computer
  • UptimeRobot offers SMS in paid plans
  • Many tools integrate with services like Twilio

Other channels

Modern monitoring tools often support:

  • Slack: Direct message in your team channel
  • Telegram: Free and reliable
  • Webhooks: Connect with your own systems
  • PagerDuty/Opsgenie: For professional on-call rotations

What to do with downtime notifications

Receiving a downtime alert? Follow these steps:

Step 1: Verify the notification

Sometimes alerts are false positives. First check:

  1. Open your website in a browser
  2. Try from a different location (for example your phone via 4G)
  3. Use an online tool like downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Step 2: Identify the problem

If your website is actually down:

  1. Check your hosting dashboard: Log into DirectAdmin and check if everything is working normally
  2. View error logs: Go to Error Logs in DirectAdmin
  3. Check your domain: Is your domain still correctly connected?

Step 3: Take action

Depending on the problem:

  • Server overloaded: Check your resource usage
  • SSL problem: Renew your Let us Encrypt certificate
  • Configuration error: Restore recent changes
  • Unclear: Contact Theory7 support

Step 4: Document

Note what happened and how you resolved it. This helps with future problems.

Using monitoring reports

Uptime monitoring provides valuable insights:

  • Uptime percentage: Aim for 99.9% or higher
  • Response times: Slow times can predict problems
  • Incident history: Pattern recognition for structural problems

Use this data to support conversations with your hosting provider or to decide on infrastructure improvements.

Tips for effective monitoring

  1. Monitor from multiple locations for more accurate results
  2. Set reasonable intervals - every minute is better than every 5 minutes
  3. Configure escalation - if the first person does not respond, alert the next
  4. Test your alerts - send a test notification to verify everything works
  5. Combine with internal monitoring - external uptime monitoring plus internal server status

With good uptime monitoring, you always have insight into the availability of your website. With Theory7 hosting, we strive for maximum uptime, and with external monitoring, you can verify this yourself and act quickly if something goes wrong.