You have spent hours writing posts for your blog. Blog posts that you hope will bring lots of visitors to your site. Then your site has an error and no one can get access to your site. How can you monitor the uptime or downtime of your website? How will you know if there is a problem with your site? I will show you a free tool to monitor website uptime and downtime. A tool that will keep an eye on your website so you don’t have to. If your site is down, this service will send you a notification. Once you know there is a problem, you can investigate and get the problem solved.
Let’s begin.
- Free uptime monitoring service.
- Sign up for a free account.
- How to set up uptime monitoring for your website.
- You have created your uptime monitor.
- Uptime Robot dashboard.
- YouTube video tutorial.
- Frequently asked questions.
- Conclusion
Free uptime monitoring service
The service I use to monitor my sites is ‘Uptime Robot‘. Their free option allows you to have up to 50 monitors with uptime checks as often as every five minutes.
This is Uptime Robot’s homepage.
Sign up for a free account
It is super easy to get a free account. First, click on the ‘Sign Up’ link on the top right of the homepage.
Once you click on that link you get this page.
Here, you fill in your name, email address and password that you want to use with your free account. From that you confirm you are not a robot by ticking the ‘I’m not a robot’ box and then you click ‘Sign up’.
After you click on sign up you will get this message.
Before you can use Uptime robot, you need to check your email and confirm your email address.
Once you have confirmed your email address go back to Uptime robot’s homepage and sign in.
After you sign in for the first time. Your dashboard will look like this.
How to set up uptime monitoring for your website
First, you need to set up a monitor for your website, click on the green ‘Add New Monitor’ link on the top left of the page.
Once you click on that link you get this.
From the monitor type drop down box, you need to select ‘HTTP(s)’.
Once you select HTTP(s), more details are needed to set up your monitor.
The second box asks you for a ‘Friendly Name’. This is like a nickname you can give for this monitor.
If you have multiple websites, it will get confusing for you if you just use generic terms like monitor 1.
For me, I use the website name as my ‘Friendly Name’.
The next box requires the URL of your website. You do not need to add an ‘S’ to the end of HTTP.
The last box asks you to set the frequency of checks you want Uptime robot to do for your website.
With a free account the minimum monitoring interval you can set is five minutes. If you think that is too often then just move the green bar to the right until you find the time you are happy with.
In my example, I have set a monitor for this website. The monitor will check uptime every 60 minutes.
After you have finished inputting your details. Scroll to the bottom of the page, you will find a blue ‘Create monitor’ link.
Just above this link you will see the email address you used to create your free account.
Uptime robot needs an email address to send you notifications if your website is down.
If you are happy to use this email address to receive notifications, then tick the box like this.
Lastly, click on the blue ‘Create Monitor’ link.
You have created your uptime monitor
Then you get this confirmation message confirming that you have set up a monitor successfully.
Click on ‘Close’ next to ‘Create Monitor’ to close this popup window.
Uptime Robot dashboard
After you close the popup you will come to your account dashboard.
On the left, you will see a list of your monitors. On the right, you will have the current statistics of your monitors.
I have just set up this monitor so everything is perfect.
Underneath the quick stat display, you have a running counter for your monitors. You see your website uptime from when you started the monitor or since the last time the website was down.
From my timer you can see that I started this monitor 7 minutes ago and all is good with my website.
I have set this monitor to check my website every 60 minutes. When the timer reaches 60 minutes it will check my website to make sure it is up.
If it is down I will get an email notification. If all is well then the next check will take place after another 60 minutes and so on.
YouTube video tutorial
Here is a tutorial from One Web Street. He gives a detailed walk through on how to configure UpTime robot for your website.
Frequently asked questions
How do you check uptime?
I use Uptime robot to check uptime of my websites. They have a free option that allows you to set up a monitor to check your websites every five minutes to check they are not down.
If the monitor finds that your website is down you get a notification via email. The monitor continues to check your website. If your website comes back then you will receive another email to let you know.
What is Uptime robot?
Uptime robot is a website uptime monitoring service. They both free and paid options.
It is not possible to check yourself if your website is online all the time. Because of that, you need a service that will ‘ping’ your website to make sure it is accessible.
You also need to receive notifications when there are problems. Uptime robot will send you an email the instant they find your website is not accessible.
I have used Uptime Robot for all my websites from the start and found their uptime monitoring service excellent.
What is website uptime?
Website uptime means that your website is accessible on the internet. If someone clicks on a link to your website then your website loads correctly.
Downtime is the opposite. Someone wants to access your website and all they get is an error message. Very bad!
What is good Uptime?
Uptime is measured in percentage. You want uptime to be as close to 100% as possible.
100% uptime means your website will always be accessible on the website 24/7.
Hosting companies will try to tempt you to buy by guaranteeing high uptime percentages. For example, if you go over to Hostgator, they guarantee 99.99% uptime.
Stay away from hosting companies that have bad reviews regarding uptime. Poor uptime means websites are having occasional downtime.
What is an uptime guarantee?
Hosting companies will promote their hosting packages with uptime guarantees. Uptime means when a website is accessible on the internet.
As a website owner you want your site to be accessible to your visitors 24/7.
You want 100% uptime. So when you are looking for hosting you should be looking at how close to 100% the hosting company is guaranteeing.
For example, if you go to Hostgator, they guarantee 99.99% uptime. This means that if you host with them, your site will almost never have any downtime.
Conclusion
Setting up uptime monitoring for your website is very easy with Uptime Robot. After a few minutes you have a free service checking your website uptime.
If Uptime robot finds your website down, it will send you an email notification.
You will also receive another email notification from Uptime robot when it finds your website is back up.
I have been using Uptime robot since I started blogging and have found the tool excellent.
There might be other tools out there but I have never used them due to the fact that I have been very happy with Uptime robot.
How about another free tool to monitor your website visitors? Check out my ‘How do I know how many visitors visit my website?‘ post. I tell you about another great free service.
Comments
How do you monitor website uptime of your blog?
Do you use Uptime robot? What do you think of Uptime robot?
Did my post convince you to create an uptime monitor?
I look forward to reading your comments
