Uptime monitoring is the automatic tracking of whether a website is functioning, how fast it responds, and whether errors occur. The tool regularly checks the page from multiple locations and immediately alerts the administrator in the event of an outage. Without it, a company finds out about unavailability from a customer, or only from a drop in revenue, and an outage over a weekend can last two days. It is worth monitoring not only the homepage but also key parts of the process, namely the product page, the cart and form submission, because the website can be available while the order process is broken. An alert about an upcoming certificate or domain expiry is also useful. Basic monitoring is offered by tools free of charge, which is a negligible cost compared with the loss from an hour-long outage.
See also: HTTP status codes, Hosting and SEO, SSL certificate.
