# Website Downtime and Uptime Monitoring

Source: https://dijitulsupport.co.uk/website-downtime-monitoring/
Updated: 2026-10-10

> dijitul support monitors your website around the clock and alerts us when it goes down, slows badly or shows an error, so we can investigate and fix the cause rather than waiting for a customer to tell you. Uptime monitoring is included in our Essential plan at £25 a month + VAT, alongside updates, backups and security monitoring.

## Common symptoms

- A customer told you your site was down before you noticed
- Your site shows 500, 502, 503 or 504 errors now and then
- Cloudflare error 521 or 522 pages appear
- "Resource limit reached" or "508" messages from your host
- The site is slow or unreachable at certain times of day
- Your domain or SSL certificate expired without warning

## Key facts

- Uptime monitoring is included in every plan, from Essential at £25 a month + VAT
- We check that the right page content loads, not just that the server replies
- SSL certificate and domain expiry are watched so they never lapse unnoticed
- Alerts go to us; we investigate the cause, not just restart things
- Common causes of downtime: hosting outages, resource limits, expired domains, DNS errors and bad updates
- Fixes beyond your plan's included time are £45 an hour + VAT

## Why you need monitoring

Most small businesses only find out their site is down when someone tells them, often days later. By then you have lost enquiries, sales and possibly a bit of standing with Google, which notices when its crawler repeatedly gets errors. Nobody is watching their own website at 2am on a Sunday, which is exactly when a host's maintenance or a failed automatic update tends to bite.

Monitoring means a service checks your site from outside at regular intervals, as a visitor would, and raises an alert the moment something is wrong. That turns a silent outage into a ticket we are already working on.

## What we monitor

- **Availability.** Does the site respond, and with a healthy status code rather than a 5xx error?
- **Content.** A keyword check confirms the real page loaded. A host's holding page or a PHP error can return "200 OK" while showing nothing useful.
- **Response time.** Sudden slowdowns often come before a full outage.
- **SSL certificate expiry.** Certificates now renew more often, so a broken renewal is caught before visitors see a warning. See SSL certificate support.
- **Domain expiry.** An expired domain takes your website and email down together.
- **Security.** File changes and malware signatures, as part of plan security monitoring.

## What the error codes usually mean

| Error | Typical cause |

| 500 Internal Server Error | A PHP fatal error, bad *.htaccess* rule or plugin conflict |
| 502 Bad Gateway / 504 Gateway Timeout | PHP-FPM workers exhausted or a slow database query timing out |
| 503 Service Unavailable | Server overloaded, or WordPress stuck in maintenance mode |
| 508 Resource Limit Reached | Shared hosting CPU or process limits hit, often by bots |
| Cloudflare 521 / 522 | Cloudflare cannot reach your server: it is down or a firewall is blocking Cloudflare |
| DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN | Domain expired or DNS records missing |

## What happens when an alert fires

An alert is only useful if someone acts on it. When monitoring flags a problem, we check whether it is a blip or a real outage, then look at the cause: host status pages, server error logs, recent updates and DNS. If a plugin update caused it, we roll it back from backup; if the host is down, we chase them and keep you informed; if bots are hammering the site and tripping resource limits, we block them with firewall rules or Cloudflare. Repeated short outages usually point to an underlying problem, such as hosting that is too small, which we raise with you. For sites already down, see broken website repair.

## Preventing the next outage

Monitoring tells us when something has gone wrong; the bigger win is stopping it happening again. After an outage we look for the pattern. If bots and aggressive crawlers keep tripping resource limits, we block them at the firewall or with Cloudflare and tune *robots.txt*. If WP-Cron is firing heavy tasks on every visit, we move it to a real server cron at a quiet hour. If a backup or broken-link checker plugin runs during business hours, we reschedule it. If the hosting plan simply cannot cope, we show you the monitoring history so you can decide on an upgrade with real evidence rather than a sales pitch. Keeping software updated also removes a whole class of outages caused by known bugs and exploited vulnerabilities.

## Plans and pricing

Uptime monitoring is part of every support plan: Essential at **£25 a month + VAT** (updates, daily backups, uptime and security monitoring), Business at £50 a month + VAT (adds an hour of fixes each month and priority support) and Complete at £99 a month + VAT (three hours a month plus IT and Microsoft 365 helpdesk). On Essential, fixing the cause of an outage beyond routine updates and restores is charged at £45 an hour + VAT. Start monitoring your site.

## FAQs

### How much does website uptime monitoring cost?

dijitul support includes uptime monitoring in every plan, starting with Essential at £25 a month + VAT, which also covers updates, daily backups and security monitoring. Monitoring is most useful alongside someone who can fix the problem, which is why we bundle it.

### Can't I just use a free uptime monitor?

You can, and it is better than nothing. The catch is that the alert goes to you, and you then need to work out the cause and fix it. With dijitul support the alert comes to us, and we investigate and resolve it.

### Why does my site go down at random times?

Intermittent outages usually mean hosting resource limits being hit, often by bots or crawlers, a slow database query exhausting PHP workers, a scheduled task running at a busy time, or problems at the host. Monitoring history helps us match outages to their cause.

### What does Cloudflare error 522 mean?

Error 522 means Cloudflare could not connect to your web server in time. Either the server is down or overloaded, or a firewall on the server is blocking Cloudflare's IP addresses. The fix is on the hosting side, not in Cloudflare.

### Do you monitor domain and SSL expiry too?

Yes. An expired domain takes down your website and email together, and an expired SSL certificate shows visitors a security warning. dijitul support watches both so renewals are sorted before anything lapses.

## Pricing and contact

Support plans from £25 a month + VAT, or £45 an hour + VAT for one-off fixes. Plans: Essential £25/month + VAT (Website software updates (core, plugins, themes) applied and checked, Daily backups, Uptime monitoring, Security monitoring); Business £50/month + VAT (Everything in Essential, 1 hour of fixes or changes every month, Priority support); Complete £99/month + VAT (Everything in Business, 3 hours of fixes or changes every month, IT and Microsoft 365 helpdesk for your team). Ad-hoc support is £45 an hour + VAT. The first 30 minutes are the minimum charge, then we bill in 15-minute blocks. Contact: 01623 650333, support@dijitul.uk, https://dijitulsupport.co.uk/contact/