Website Uptime Monitoring 101: What to Track and How Often

"Uptime" sounds simple -- is the site up or down -- but most of the value in monitoring it comes from the details: how often you check, what counts as "down," and what a monitor actually looks at beyond a single successful response.

What a monitor should actually check

A monitor that just confirms your homepage returns any HTTP response isn't telling you much. A useful check looks at:

• Status code -- a 200 is good, but a 500 from your application, a 502 from a proxy, and a 404 from a broken deploy all mean different things.
• Response latency -- a site that responds in 8 seconds is technically "up," but it's failing its visitors just as surely as if it were down.
• Availability over a window -- one failed check could be a network blip anywhere between the monitor and your server. Availability over the last 30 days is a far more honest number than a single check.

How often to check

There's a real tradeoff here. Checking every minute catches outages fast but generates a lot of noise and cost for a site that rarely goes down. Checking every hour is cheap but means an outage could run most of a working day before anyone notices. For most small and mid-sized sites, checking every 5 minutes for basic reachability, with a slower daily or hourly cadence for heavier checks like a full performance audit, is a reasonable middle ground -- frequent enough to catch real incidents quickly, without treating every network hiccup as an emergency.

What counts as "down"

This is where a lot of monitoring setups go wrong. If you alert on the very first failed check, you will get paged for transient blips -- a DNS resolver having a bad moment, a single dropped packet -- that resolve themselves before you've even opened your laptop. The fix isn't to check less often; it's to only treat something as a real incident once it's failed consistently, for example three checks in a row. That single change removes most of the noise without meaningfully delaying detection of a genuine outage. We cover this in more depth in our post on avoiding alert fatigue.

Uptime is necessary, not sufficient

A site that's technically up but takes six seconds to load, or one that's up and fast but silently broken for GDPR compliance, is still failing its visitors. Uptime monitoring is the foundation, but it's worth pairing with performance monitoring and compliance checks so you're not just watching the one failure mode that happens to be easiest to measure.

A short checklist

1. Check status code and latency, not just "did it respond."
2. Check often enough to catch real incidents quickly -- every 5 minutes is a reasonable default.
3. Require a consecutive-failure streak before you call it an incident and alert on it.
4. Track availability as a rolling percentage, not a single point-in-time check.