Website Downtime and Uptime Monitoring

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

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.

What it costs

Support plans from £25 a month + VAT, or £45 an hour + VAT for one-off fixes. Pick a plan if you want it looked after every month, or pay by the hour for a one-off job.

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