Here's a question worth asking: if your website went down right now, how long would it take you to find out? For most small businesses the honest answer is "when someone complains" — which can be hours, or a whole weekend.
What Uptime Monitoring Does
A monitoring service checks your website from several locations around the world, every minute or so. If it doesn't respond — or responds with an error, or takes too long — you get an alert by email, SMS, Slack or WhatsApp. Good monitors also check:
- SSL certificate expiry — an expired certificate makes browsers show a scary warning.
- Domain expiry — yes, businesses lose their domain by forgetting to renew it.
- Key pages and flows — not just the homepage, but checkout, login or your booking form.
- Response time — a site that's slowing down is often about to fall over.
Why It Matters More Than You Think
Lost revenue
For an online shop, every hour offline is lost orders. For a service business, it's lost enquiries — and those visitors may go straight to a competitor.
Lost trust
A customer who hits an error page once is less likely to come back. Search engines notice repeated downtime too.
Faster fixes
When an alert fires at 2am, a fix can start at 2:05am. Without monitoring, it starts whenever someone notices.
Status Pages: Turning Outages Into Trust
A public status page (like status.yourcompany.com) shows customers whether your services are working, with incident updates when something goes wrong. It sounds counter-intuitive to advertise downtime, but it does the opposite of harm: customers see you're on it, support queries drop, and it signals a professional operation. For SaaS products and apps with business customers, it's increasingly expected.
What It Costs
Basic monitoring is inexpensive. Our status monitoring plans start at £14/month and include multi-location checks, SSL and domain alerts, and a branded status page on higher tiers. If your site is on our managed hosting, uptime monitoring is already built in and our team receives the alerts, not just you.
Monitoring Is One Piece of the Puzzle
Monitoring tells you something is wrong. Backups, updates and a team that can fix it are what get you back online. That's why we bundle them together in our website care plans. And if your site is going down regularly, the cause is often the hosting itself — our comparison of managed vs shared hosting explains why.
Want to know how reliable your site has really been? Ask us and we'll set up a free two-week monitor so you can see the numbers for yourself.