Website uptime monitoring service description
By: Konstantin Bogomolov
Tags: Uptime, Monitoring, Availability, Servers, Downtime

This is a complete description of what is uptime and how to measure it. What is this article about:

What is uptime

How to measure uptime

How to use “UpTime.onl” service to measure your website uptime

What is website uptime?

Uptime is a metric that represents the percentage of time that website has been working. It is a measure of website reliability. The higher is the better.

Ideally, uptime would be 100%. But it is almost impossible to achieve in the real world. There are lots of reasons, which may affect a website uptime. It might be DNS issues, network failures, server hardware failures, software bugs, and others.

Even if you can’t manage some factors, it is crucial to measure and compare your website uptime. At least, the measurement will show if you should pay attention to the downtimes or not. Probably, you don’t know that your hosting provider has downtimes (i.e. not working) from time to time.

Let’s see an example. Let’s imagine, that your uptime is 99.5%. This 0.5% of downtime is approximately 44 hours a year, which means that your website is down for almost 2 days in the year. During these two days per year, you may lose sales. If these numbers are not acceptable for your business, you have to take steps to improve your website uptime.

Here is the screenshot with an example of uptime from our dashboard. You can see here a 99.97% uptime.

Now you know that measuring uptime is very important. Let’s see how you can measure it.

How to measure website uptime?

The next step is to start to measure the uptime. The measurement process is pretty simple. Manually or using a monitoring tool or a service, you check the URL for the correct response.

You can check it on the server-side or remotely, using an external service. You may measure uptime using different software or services. For example, you may measure your database independently. It is important to know if every part of your website or web app is working.

The simplest way is to you a service that does not require any installation, like ours. Let’s see how our service checks your website and calculates the uptime.

The service checks every 1 minute on the Pro plan or every 5 minutes on the Free plan. Then it calculates how many times and the percentage of time your website was available.

It is very easy to start using our service. Just add an URL in the dashboard and our service immediately starts checking it. The uptime checker tool requests provided URL and gets status and response. It doesn’t render HTML, load assets, or run Javascript. We have a Frontend checker for that on the Pro plan.

The uptime checker checks the HTTP response status at first. HTTP response status indicates whether a request has been successfully completed. For example, if your webserver returns 404 or 502 or any other error HTTP statuses, the website will be counted as not available or down.

The second check is a keyword or phrase. You can add any string in the parameters to check. If the response status is successful, the service will check the response content. If the content does not contain provided string, the website will be counted as down. For example, for this very article page, you can set the phrase “uptime check”. If the page is loaded and no such text exists in the response, the website is not working properly.

Now you know how our uptime checker tool works. The next step is to set up it to check.

How to measure uptime using “UpTime.onl” service

This section explains how to create and configure uptime checks using the “UpTime.onl” tool.

At first, you have to register, if you have not done it earlier.

To add a new URL, choose the “Websites” menu on the left navigation panel. Then click Add website button.

You can add here any URL or website. It might be static websites or any based on the frameworks or CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal. Just enter or paste copied URL to the URL field. That’s enough to start checking.

If you want to check the response for a keyword or a phrase, fill in the “Word/phrase to check on page” field. It is optional.

The next step is a notification. You may want just to measure an uptime or be notified of every downtime. Check the box near the email if you want to be notified. Change email if you want to receive notifications to a different email. The default email is your account email.

Then press the Save button.

That’s it. From this point, the service starts checking your URL every 5 minutes in the Free plan and every 1 minute in the Pro plan. Now you can proceed to the dashboard and see the measurements.

Start free monitoring