In this guide
Most website owners hear about an outage from a customer, hours later. Uptime monitoring checks your site on a schedule and tells you within minutes when it stops answering, and again when it is back.
Key takeaways
- Uptime monitoring checks your site on a schedule and alerts you when it stops answering.
- 99.9% uptime still allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month.
- Checking every 5 minutes catches outages fast without loading your server.
- A site can be up and still invisible to Google, so watch SEO signals too.
What an uptime check does
A monitoring service requests your page, follows redirects, and records the status code and response time. A status below 400 means up; an error, a timeout or a status of 400 and above means down.
Good monitoring checks twice before alerting, so a single network hiccup does not wake you up.
What the percentages mean
- 99% uptime allows about 7 hours of downtime a month.
- 99.9% allows about 43 minutes a month.
- 99.99% allows about 4 minutes a month.
How often to check
Every 5 minutes is the usual balance for business websites: an outage is caught within minutes, without loading your server. Shops and booking sites gain the most, because every minute down is lost orders.
Uptime is not the whole story
That is why Studio's monitoring combines a daily watch of these SEO-critical signals, a weekly full health check, and on paid plans a 5-minute uptime check with email alerts.
- A site can be up and still invisible: a noindex left on, robots.txt blocking Google.
- A certificate or domain can expire without warning if renewal fails.
- A redirect change can send visitors to the wrong page.
Checklist
- Add your website to Studio and prove you control it.
- Turn on monitoring for daily SEO checks and a weekly health check.
- On a paid plan, confirm uptime checks appear on the website page.
- Make sure alert emails reach the right inbox (or a Slack or Discord channel).
- Share a status page with your client if they ask how the site is doing.
Questions
Can I monitor uptime for free?
Studio's free plan watches 2 websites daily for downtime and SEO changes. The 5-minute uptime checks come with the paid plans.
Why do I need to verify my website?
Monitoring visits a site on a schedule, so Studio first asks you to prove you control it with a meta tag, a file or a DNS record. This stops anyone from pointing monitoring at other people's sites.