Find out your website is down from us, not from a customer

The problem, without the jargon

Your website is how people find you, book you or buy from you. It can stop working without any announcement: the company that hosts it has a bad night, a renewal payment fails, someone updates something and it breaks. Usually you learn about it when a customer phones, or worse, when nobody does and the enquiries simply stop for a few days.

Website monitoring is a service that visits your site every minute or so, the way a visitor would, and tells you straight away if it is not there. That is all it is. Think of a security guard who walks past the shop window every minute and rings you if the window is broken.

What you actually get

• A message when something is wrong. By email, or on your phone through Telegram. It says which page, what the problem is and when it began.
• A message when it is fixed. So you know you can stop worrying, and how long it lasted.
• A warning before things run out. Your website's security certificate and your domain name both expire on a date. We tell you a month ahead, so a missed renewal never takes the site offline.
• A monthly summary by email. On the first of each month: how much of the time the site was available, anything that went wrong, and whether the certificate and domain are healthy. It takes a minute to read and is something to forward to your accountant or your web person.

How we avoid false alarms

Nothing is more annoying than a phone buzzing at night for a problem that does not exist. Before we tell you anything, several of our checking locations in different places look at your site at nearly the same time. We only raise the alarm when they agree. A hiccup on one internet route that affects one location does not wake you up.

Setting it up takes minutes

1. Create a free account with your email address.
2. Paste your website address, for example your home page.
3. Choose where messages should go. Email is already filled in.
4. Press save. The first check runs within seconds.

If you would rather not touch it, ask the person who built your site to do this. They will recognise the steps, and the monthly summary can go to both of you.

What it costs, honestly

The Free plan costs nothing and covers 30 things to watch, checked every five minutes, including checks that specific words appear on a page. For one small business site with a home page, a contact page and a booking page that is plenty to begin with. Starter costs $7 a month and checks every minute, adds the certificate and domain warnings, and sends you the monthly summary email. Pro at $29 a month is for people who want escalation to a second contact, or who promise uptime to their own customers. Prices are shown without tax and billed monthly, or ten months for twelve if you pay for the year. All the plans are on the pricing page.

If your site is built and looked after by an agency, ask whether they use a monitoring service and whether you can see the monthly report. Agencies can read about what we offer them on the agency page.

What it cannot do

Monitoring tells you that something is broken. It does not fix it, and it cannot promise your hosting company will be reliable. It also cannot judge whether your site is making sales, only whether it is reachable and showing what it should. Think of it as the smoke detector, not the fire brigade. You still need someone you can call, and ideally that person is already receiving the same message.

If you run an online shop, look at the page for online stores. If your site runs on WordPress, see the WordPress page. For the full list of what is included, see all features.