# How to monitor your website's uptime

> Why sites go down, the three ways to know before your visitors do, and the free tools that watch a site around the clock so you do not have to.

Source: https://cwp.sg/tutorials/monitor-website-uptime/  
Author: Ben Johnson  
Last verified: 2026-09-21

**In short:** - Uptime is the share of time your site is reachable. You want to hear about downtime before your visitors do. - Do not rely on loading the site yourself — your browser and network lie to you with cached copies. - Use an outside checker to confirm whether a site is down for everyone or just you. - Set up a free monitor that tests the site every few minutes and alerts you when it fails. - When it is down, work out first whether it is DNS, the server, or a resource limit.

Uptime is the share of time your website is reachable. Downtime is the rest —
the minutes or hours when a visitor gets an error instead of your site. On a free
or shared plan there is no service guarantee, so knowing when your site is down,
and why, is on you. This page covers how to find out before your visitors do.

The trap everyone falls into is checking the site themselves, seeing it load, and
assuming all is well. Your own browser is the worst possible judge. It caches
pages, your network caches DNS, and both will happily show you a working site
that is broken for everyone else. Real monitoring means testing from outside, on
a schedule, whether or not you are watching.

## Why sites go down

Downtime is not one problem, it is several, and the fix depends on which you have.

The most common on a busy free plan is a resource limit. Too many visitors arrive
at once, the plan's ceiling is hit, and new visitors get a
[508 resource limit](/errors/508-resource-limit-is-reached/) error while the site
itself is fine. The second is DNS: the name stops pointing at the server, so the
site is unreachable even though it is running. That family of failures is covered
in the [DNS guide](/tutorials/dns/). The third is the server or the host itself
having a bad day, which is the one thing you cannot fix and can only wait out —
and the reason a paid plan with a real uptime commitment can be worth it, as the
[free versus paid breakdown](/compare/free-vs-paid-hosting/) explains.

## The three ways to know

There are three levels of watching a site, from crude to proper.

**Check it yourself, from outside.** When you suspect the site is down, the first
question is whether it is down for everyone or just you. An outside checker
answers that in seconds. [IsItDown.now](https://isitdown.now/) loads your site
from its own servers and tells you what the rest of the world sees, which
immediately separates a real outage from a problem on your own machine.

**Set up an automatic monitor.** A checker you have to remember to run is no use
at three in the morning. A monitoring service tests your site every few minutes,
day and night, and messages you the moment it fails. Several run a free tier that
covers a handful of sites, which is plenty for one project.

**Watch the trend, not just the moment.** Good monitors keep a history, so you
can see whether your site drops out every day at the same busy hour — a sign you
are hitting a resource limit and should add caching — or whether outages are
random, which points at the host.

## What to check, and how often

Test the real page a visitor loads, not just whether the server answers. A server
can be up and still serving a broken page, so a good monitor looks for a word it
expects to find on the page, not merely a response.

Every five minutes is a sensible interval for a small site. More often than that
rarely tells you anything new and can look like unwanted traffic to your host.
Check from more than one location if you can, because a site can be reachable from
one part of the world and not another, especially just after a DNS change.

## When the monitor says it is down

Do not panic, and do not immediately blame the host. Work through it in order.
First, confirm it is really down using an outside checker like the one above, so
you are not chasing a problem that only exists on your network. Next, decide
whether the name resolves at all: if it does not, it is DNS. If it resolves but
the page errors, read the error — a 508 is a resource limit, a 500 is usually
your own code or a bad config file, and a plain timeout points at the server.
Each of those has its own fix, and knowing which one you are looking at saves you
from restarting things that were never broken.

## Your uptime plan, in order

For a site you care about:

1. Bookmark an outside checker so you can confirm an outage in seconds.
2. Set up a free monitor that tests the real page every five minutes.
3. Turn on its alerts so it wakes you, not your visitors.
4. Watch the history for a daily pattern that means "add caching."
5. If outages are random and frequent, that is the host, and it is the signal to
   consider a plan with a real uptime guarantee.

That is the whole of it. Two of the steps are free tools and the rest is a habit,
and together they mean you hear about downtime first.

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Content Website Platform (cwp.sg) operates the free hosting it writes about; see https://cwp.sg/about/ for the methodology and the commercial disclosure.