Uptime Monitoring

Keep your website online and accessible with 24/7 uptime monitoring. MerySpeak checks your website at regular intervals and instantly alerts you when downtime occurs, so you can fix issues before they impact your users.

What is Uptime Monitoring?

Uptime monitoring is the practice of continuously checking whether your website is accessible and responding correctly to user requests. When you add a website to MerySpeak, our monitoring system sends HTTP requests to your site at regular intervals (every 1-5 minutes depending on your plan) and records whether the request succeeds or fails.

If your website fails to respond, returns an error status code (like 500 Internal Server Error), or takes too long to respond, MerySpeak detects this as downtime and immediately sends you an email alert. You'll also receive a notification when your site comes back online, along with information about how long the outage lasted.

This continuous monitoring allows you to maintain high availability for your users and quickly respond to issues before they escalate into major problems.

Key Features

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Frequent Checks

Monitor your website every 1-5 minutes with reliable HTTP checks from our servers.

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Instant Alerts

Receive immediate email notifications when your site goes down or comes back up.

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Uptime Statistics

View uptime percentages for the last 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days at a glance.

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Incident History

Access detailed logs of past outages including start time, duration, and error messages.

How It Works

MerySpeak's uptime monitoring follows a simple but effective process:

  1. HTTP Request

    Our monitoring servers send an HTTP GET request to your website URL at scheduled intervals.

  2. Response Analysis

    We analyze the response status code and verify that your site returned successfully (2xx status).

  3. Status Update

    Your website's status is updated in your dashboard - showing UP (green) or DOWN (red).

  4. Alert Dispatch

    If status changes from UP to DOWN (or vice versa), we immediately send an email notification.

  5. Incident Logging

    Downtime events are recorded with timestamps, creating a complete incident history for analysis.

Understanding Uptime Percentages

Uptime is typically expressed as a percentage that represents how often your website was available during a given time period. Here's what different uptime levels mean:

Uptime % Downtime/Month Downtime/Year Rating
99.999% 26 seconds 5 minutes Excellent
99.99% 4 minutes 52 minutes Excellent
99.9% 43 minutes 8.7 hours Good
99% 7.2 hours 3.6 days Fair
95% 36 hours 18.2 days Poor

Most businesses should aim for at least 99.9% uptime for customer-facing applications. MerySpeak helps you track this metric automatically and identify patterns in downtime events.

Use Cases

E-commerce Websites

Online stores can't afford downtime during sales or peak shopping periods. Uptime monitoring ensures you're immediately aware of any issues that could prevent customers from completing purchases, protecting your revenue and reputation.

SaaS Applications

Software-as-a-service providers often have uptime commitments in their SLAs. Continuous monitoring helps you meet these obligations and provides data for uptime reports that demonstrate your reliability to customers.

Marketing Landing Pages

When running advertising campaigns, a down landing page means wasted ad spend. Monitor your campaign pages to ensure visitors can always reach your content and convert.

API Endpoints

If other applications depend on your API, downtime affects not just you but everyone who integrates with your service. Monitor critical API endpoints to maintain ecosystem reliability.

Common Causes of Downtime

Understanding why websites go down helps you prevent future outages:

  • Server hardware failures - Hard drives, memory, or other components can fail unexpectedly
  • Software crashes - Bugs in your application code or dependencies can cause crashes
  • DDoS attacks - Malicious traffic floods can overwhelm your server resources
  • Expired SSL certificates - Browsers will block access to sites with invalid certificates
  • DNS issues - Problems with domain name resolution can make your site unreachable
  • Hosting provider outages - Even major cloud providers experience occasional downtime
  • Traffic spikes - Unexpected viral content or events can exceed your server capacity
  • Failed deployments - Code updates can introduce bugs that crash the application
  • Database problems - Connection limits, slow queries, or data corruption issues

Start Monitoring Your Website Uptime

Get instant alerts when your website goes down. Free to start, no credit card required.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is website uptime monitoring?

Website uptime monitoring is the process of continuously checking whether your website is accessible and responding to requests. Monitoring services like MerySpeak send requests to your site at regular intervals and track whether the site returns a successful response. If the site fails to respond or returns an error, you receive an alert so you can investigate and fix the issue.

How often should I monitor my website uptime?

For business-critical websites, 1-minute monitoring intervals are recommended to detect outages quickly. For less critical sites, 5-minute intervals provide good coverage while being cost-effective. MerySpeak offers 5-minute monitoring on the free plan and 1-minute monitoring for Pro users.

What causes website downtime?

Common causes of website downtime include server hardware failures, software crashes or bugs, DDoS attacks, expired SSL certificates, DNS issues, hosting provider outages, exceeded bandwidth or resource limits, and failed deployments or updates. Regular monitoring helps you identify and address these issues quickly.

How is uptime percentage calculated?

Uptime percentage is calculated as (Total time - Downtime) / Total time * 100. For example, if your site was down for 1 hour in a 30-day month (720 hours), your uptime would be (720-1)/720 * 100 = 99.86%. MerySpeak tracks this automatically based on monitoring check results.

What is considered good website uptime?

Industry standard for good uptime is 99.9% or higher, often called "three nines". This allows for about 8.76 hours of downtime per year. Enterprise-grade services aim for 99.99% (52 minutes/year) or 99.999% (5 minutes/year). Most businesses should target at least 99.9% uptime for customer-facing applications.

How quickly will I be notified of downtime?

MerySpeak sends instant email alerts when downtime is detected. With 1-minute monitoring intervals, you'll know about issues within 60-120 seconds of them occurring. With 5-minute intervals, notification typically arrives within 5-10 minutes. We recommend enabling email notifications in your account settings.

Does uptime monitoring affect my website performance?

No, uptime monitoring has negligible impact on your website. Each monitoring check is equivalent to a single page visit. With checks happening only every 1-5 minutes, the additional load is minimal - far less than even light organic traffic to your site.

What HTTP status codes indicate downtime?

MerySpeak considers your site "up" when it returns a 2xx status code (like 200 OK). Server errors (5xx codes like 500, 502, 503) indicate downtime. Client errors (4xx codes) may indicate configuration issues. Connection timeouts and DNS failures are also recorded as downtime events.