Website Monitoring & Uptime Alerts

Know the moment your site goes down—and the moment it comes back. UpDog checks your URLs on a schedule, tracks response time, and sends downtime notifications fast via email and SMS.

Keep it simple: one monitor per critical URL, alerts your team will actually see, and a clean timeline you can use during incident review.

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Website monitoring dashboard showing one site down and alerts

Fast detection

Website monitoring is only useful if it’s quick. Run scheduled checks so you find out about downtime before users do.

Uptime alerts (down + recovery)

Get downtime notifications by email and SMS, and route events into your workflow via integrations.

Response time history

See whether issues are hard outages or slow degradation. Pair this page with response time monitoring when performance is a reliability requirement.

What is website monitoring?

Website monitoring is a scheduled check that confirms a URL is reachable and responding as expected. In practice, that usually means making an HTTP/HTTPS request and verifying you got a valid response.

It’s not just “is the server up?”—it’s “can users load the site?” That’s why website monitoring is different from low-level reachability checks like ping monitoring: HTTP tells you about your app and web layer, not only the network path.

What UpDog checks

For website monitoring, UpDog makes an HTTP/HTTPS request to the URL you provide and records the result over time. That gives you a clean signal you can alert on and a history you can use when debugging.

  • HTTP(S) request succeeds: a response is returned within the timeout window.
  • Status code outcome: UpDog treats 2xx/3xx as “up” and 4xx/5xx as “down”. Redirects are followed, so the final response is what’s evaluated.
  • Response time tracking: each check records how long the request took, so you can separate “down” from “slow.” See response time monitoring for deeper performance workflows.
  • Content verification (optional): if you need to confirm a page contains a specific phrase (or that a banner disappeared), use keyword monitoring.

Common failure modes are straightforward: timeouts, DNS resolution issues, connection errors, and unexpected status codes (like 404/500). UpDog turns those into clear up/down state changes so you can act quickly.

Simple failure types (so you can debug faster)

  • Timeout: the URL didn’t respond in time (often overload, upstream slowness, or routing trouble).
  • DNS resolution failure: hostname couldn’t be resolved (record changes and propagation can contribute to downtime).
  • Connection error: request couldn’t connect (network issue, firewall change, service down).
  • Non-expected status: a 4xx/5xx response (app error, missing route, deploy regression).

Why uptime monitoring matters

  • Catch outages before customers: learn about problems from alerts, not support tickets.
  • Protect revenue and conversions: downtime and errors kill signups, checkouts, and retention.
  • Detect broken deployments: a “successful” deploy can still ship a 500/404 to production.
  • Spot external changes that contribute to downtime: DNS updates, routing changes, and expired domains can all break availability.
  • Reduce MTTR: faster detection means faster triage and faster recovery.
  • Build confidence: when you can answer “when did this start?”, incidents are less chaotic.

Set alerts your team will actually see

Alerts only work if they land in the right place. UpDog supports email and SMS for downtime and recovery notifications—good defaults that work everywhere.

If your team triages incidents elsewhere, you can also route events via alerts and integrations (for example, chat, on-call workflows, and custom automation via webhooks). Keep the routing simple: send high-urgency monitors to the channels that wake someone up, and keep the rest in email.

A practical alert rule

Alert on down + recovery. Down tells you to act. Recovery tells you when the blast radius is over (and gives you a clean “incident duration” without manual note-taking).

Reduce false alarms

False alarms come from flaky networks, bot-blocking, and endpoints that aren’t stable. UpDog keeps the model honest: a website check is an HTTP request, so if it fails, that’s the signal.

  • Use stable URLs: monitor an intentionally “monitor-friendly” endpoint (like /health) alongside a real user-facing path.
  • Choose sensible schedules: shorter intervals find outages sooner, but they also surface short blips. Pick the smallest interval you can respond to.
  • Keep timeouts realistic: if an endpoint sometimes takes several seconds, a too-aggressive timeout can create noise.
  • Pair signals: use ping monitoring (reachability), port monitoring (service open/closed), and SSL monitoring (certificate health) to distinguish “app down” from “network weird.”

How to set up website monitoring

  1. Add a URL you want to monitor (website or API endpoint).
  2. Choose a check schedule (and keep timeouts practical for that endpoint).
  3. Pick alert channels and recipients so the right people get notified on down + recovery.

Tip: name monitors like you debug

Use names that answer “what’s broken?” quickly: example.com (homepage), api.example.com (/health), checkout (/create-session). During an incident, clarity beats clever naming.

Best practices

  • Monitor key user paths: homepage, login, checkout, and one “golden path” API endpoint.
  • Pair website checks with supporting monitors: DNS monitoring, SSL monitoring, port monitoring, and ping monitoring help you pinpoint the failure layer faster.
  • Publish transparency when it matters: if you have a customer-facing product, consider a status page to reduce support load during incidents.

FAQ

Website monitoring makes an HTTP/HTTPS request and verifies that your site responds the way a browser would. Ping monitoring is a network reachability check (ICMP): it can be blocked even when the site works, and it can succeed even when the web app is failing. Many teams use both for better coverage.

Website monitoring answers “is it up?” based on whether the request succeeds and the site returns a successful status. Response time monitoring focuses on “is it fast?”—tracking latency over time and alerting on sustained slowdowns. If performance is part of reliability for your users, pair both signals. See response time monitoring.

Checks run on the schedule you choose (availability depends on your plan). Shorter intervals detect outages sooner; longer intervals reduce noise and reduce load on the monitored endpoint.

Transient network problems, short DNS hiccups, timeouts, and bot-blocking can cause a single request to fail. To reduce noise, monitor stable URLs, use a reasonable schedule, and consider a second monitor (like a lightweight health endpoint) to validate whether the service is truly degraded.

Yes—if it’s reachable over HTTP/HTTPS. A common pattern is to monitor a low-impact /health endpoint for a clean “service alive” signal, and also monitor one real user-facing endpoint to catch app-level regressions.

UpDog treats a successful HTTP response as “up” (2xx/3xx) and an error response as “down” (4xx/5xx). Redirects are followed, so redirecting URLs will typically be evaluated based on the final destination response rather than the intermediate redirect status.

Website monitoring works best with publicly accessible URLs. If a page requires a login session, the cleanest approach is to monitor a dedicated health endpoint or a public “logged out” page that still reflects service health—so you avoid putting credentials into monitoring checks.

Yes—use keyword monitoring when you need “up but correct.” It can catch broken deploys where a page still returns 200 but the content is wrong (like an error banner or missing UI).

When the monitor transitions from down to up, UpDog sends a recovery notification and records the timeline in the monitor’s history. That gives you a clear incident duration without manual tracking.

Checks are simple HTTP requests on a schedule, similar to a lightweight health check. For most sites, the overhead is negligible—especially if you monitor a low-impact endpoint at a reasonable interval.

Multiple, but only the ones that matter. A solid starting set is: homepage, login, checkout (if applicable), and one API health endpoint. That coverage helps you distinguish “front door down” from “a specific flow is broken.”

Start with a small set of high-signal monitors and route them to the right channels. Use email for lower urgency and SMS for “wake up” monitors. If you need richer routing, use integrations and keep ownership clear (who responds to which alerts).

Website monitoring checks whether the URL responds right now. SSL monitoring helps you catch certificate expiry and TLS issues, and DNS monitoring helps you track record changes and avoid surprises. Together, they reduce blind spots.

UpDog’s website checks are designed to give you a clear availability signal and fast alerts. If you need regional or multi-location verification, a good practice is to pair UpDog with application logs and CDN/edge metrics so you can identify region-specific issues quickly.

Related features

Website monitoring is strongest when paired with other signals. Related UpDog pages:

Ready to stop refreshing your site?

Create a website monitor in minutes. Start with one critical URL, add a health endpoint, and route alerts to email + SMS so you don’t miss downtime.

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