Uptime monitoring

Uptime monitoring is the most fundamental check TLDTrack runs. It answers one simple question, over and over, all day and all night: is your website actually loading for visitors?

How it works

Every five minutes, around the clock, TLDTrack requests your homepage from our monitoring servers in London. We then look at what comes back and decide whether the site is healthy:

• Up. The server answers within 10 seconds with anything other than a server error. A 4xx response such as a 404 still counts as up, because the server is answering. We quietly record the response time so you can see trends later.
• A single miss. If the request fails, times out, or returns a server error, it is retried after a few seconds, and we do not raise the alarm yet. One failed check is very often a momentary blip rather than a real outage. While a site is failing, it is checked every minute instead of every five.
• Confirmed down. The site has to fail two checks in a row, or four for network errors and the errors typical of shared hosting and CDNs. It is then checked again from the US and Singapore. Unless both of those reach it, the site is marked down, an incident is opened with a timestamp, and your alerts fire.
• Back up. When the site responds correctly again, the incident is closed and its total duration is recorded, so you have a clear record of exactly how long it was out for.

What counts as "down"

"Down" means more than a page that looks wrong. TLDTrack treats any of these as an outage, because each one stops a real visitor getting to your site:

• The server does not answer at all, or the connection times out.
• The site returns a server error (for example a 500 or 503).
• The domain name cannot be resolved, which usually points to a DNS or expiry problem. See DNS monitoring and domain expiry.

A broken security certificate does not count as down on its own. When https fails, the check tries plain http, and if that answers, the site is up. Certificate expiry has its own check in SSL monitoring.

Response times: the early warning

Alongside up-or-down, TLDTrack records how long each check took to load. A site that is slowly getting slower is often a site that is about to fall over: a database running out of room, a plugin gone rogue, or a server under strain. Watching the response-time trend lets you act before a slowdown becomes a full outage. If speed matters to you for its own sake, pair this with PageSpeed monitoring.

Turning it on

If you added your first site through the guided onboarding, uptime was switched on for you along with SSL, DNS and expiry. If you add a site manually later, uptime starts switched off, so you turn it on from the site's Monitoring tab. Either way it takes a moment:

1. 1
   Open the website from your Domains list. If you have not added it yet, see Add your first website.
2. 2
   Go to the Monitoring tab and switch Uptime on (or confirm it is on). This is the master switch for the five-minute check on that site.
3. 3
   Add or review your notification contacts and choose who should be told when a site goes down. Email works on every plan. SMS, push and connected channels such as Slack or Teams need a paid plan.
4. 4
   That is it. The first check runs within a few minutes, and from then on the site is checked every five minutes.

Where to set this up

Good to know

• Uptime checks run every five minutes, day and night, and every minute during the first hour of an outage.
• Watching a site does not use up any credits or allowance. There is no per-check cost.
• To monitor something that is not a normal web page, such as an API endpoint or a mail server, use a service monitor instead.
• Turning off the Uptime module in Settings hides uptime everywhere and stops its alerts for the whole team, which is different from switching the check off for one site.