FAQ Speed & Performance

How to monitor your website uptime

How uptime monitoring actually works, and what to check first the moment an alert arrives.

iFastHosting Support Team Updated 26 August 2026 5 min read Beginner

An uptime monitor is a service that requests your site at a regular interval from outside your own network and alerts you the moment it fails to get a normal response. Without one, you generally find out a site is down from a customer, a colleague, or simply by happening to check it yourself — all of which take considerably longer than an automated check running every few minutes.

How it actually works

A monitoring service sends a request to your site on a schedule you set — commonly every few minutes — and checks that the response comes back correctly and within an acceptable time. If a check fails, most services will retry once or twice from a different location before sending an alert, which avoids a false alarm caused by a single brief network hiccup on the monitor's own end rather than an actual problem with your site.

Choosing a check interval

Interval	Trade-off
Every 1-5 minutes	Fastest detection, appropriate for anything business-critical such as a store or booking system
Every 10-30 minutes	Reasonable for a lower-traffic or informational site where a short delay in noticing an issue is acceptable

Shorter intervals catch problems sooner but are only worth it where a few extra minutes of undetected downtime genuinely matters to the business. There is little downside to a short interval beyond the monitoring service's own pricing tiers, so the choice is mostly about what the site is for.

What to check when it is not just checking "is it up"

The most basic monitors check only whether a request succeeds at all. More useful monitors also check response time on every request, which means an alert can fire not only when the site is fully down but when it has become unusually slow — often a warning sign that arrives before an outright outage does. Watching response time trend upward over days or weeks, rather than only reacting to a hard failure, is one of the more useful things a monitoring service can give you.

What an alert actually means, and what it does not

An alert is the start of an investigation, not a diagnosis

A downtime alert tells you a check failed — it does not tell you why. The cause could be the site itself, the specific server it runs on, a DNS problem, or occasionally the monitoring service having a brief issue of its own. Before assuming the worst, check the site from a different network or device, and check whether the alert was a single isolated failure or a sustained one — monitoring services that retry before alerting have already ruled out the most common false alarm, but it is still worth a second look yourself.

If an alert turns out to be genuine and sustained rather than a brief blip, that is worth reporting to support directly with the time it started and any error message shown, since that specific detail is what actually helps track down the cause quickly.

Alerts are not the same as performance monitoring

Uptime monitoring answers "is the site responding at all, and how quickly." It does not tell you about page weight, Core Web Vitals, or anything about what happens once the page has started loading — those need the testing tools covered in how to test your website speed. Both are useful and neither substitutes for the other: uptime monitoring watches for the site being down or unusually slow to respond at all; speed testing tells you why a page that is up still feels slow to use.

Setting expectations

Hosting plans here carry a 99.9% uptime target, and monitoring is what lets you actually verify that in practice for your own site rather than taking it on trust — a genuine, sustained outage outside of any planned maintenance is exactly the kind of thing worth having independent evidence of, and an uptime monitor is how you get it.