Monitoring your website's uptime

We monitor our servers 24/7 — if a host or service goes down, our on-call team gets paged immediately. But for monitoring your site specifically (your domain resolves, your homepage loads, checkout works), you'll want a dedicated uptime monitoring tool.

Why monitor your site separately

Server-level uptime ≠ site-level uptime. Your hosting can be perfectly healthy while your site is down because:

• DNS misconfiguration — record points wrong, domain expired, nameservers down.
• Code bug — a deploy broke things, your site shows a 500 error.
• Database issue — disk full, query timeout, corruption.
• Plugin conflict — WordPress white screen of death.
• External dependency failure — your payment processor went down, blocking checkout.
• DDoS — site reachable from us but not from real visitors.

Monitoring your actual domain from outside our network catches these. It's also an objective measure you can show stakeholders ("we had 99.95% uptime this quarter").

Tools we recommend

All of these are free or have free tiers:

• UptimeRobot — most popular, free for 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals. SMS, email, Slack alerts.
• Pingdom — paid, more polished. Synthetic transaction monitoring (full checkout flows, not just homepage). Better visualization.
• BetterUptime — modern UI, on-call rotations, status pages. Free tier available.
• StatusCake — strong free tier, multiple test types (HTTP, ping, TLD/DNS).
• Uptime Kuma — self-hosted, open source. Good for technically-inclined teams.

Pick one and set it up to check:

• Your homepage every 5 minutes.
• Your most important pages (checkout, login, etc.) every 15 minutes.
• DNS resolution for your domain.

Alerts via email, SMS, or Slack the moment something fails.

Set up monitoring

For most tools, the basic setup is:

1. Sign up.
2. Add a monitor: type = HTTP/HTTPS, URL = https://yourdomain.com.
3. Set check interval (start with 5 minutes; tighten if you're high-stakes).
4. Add alert contacts (your email, optionally SMS or Slack webhook).
5. Save.

The tool starts checking immediately. Within an hour you'll see your first uptime data points.

What to do when something fails

You get an alert at 3 AM that your site is down. Now what?

1. Verify — check the site yourself from your phone. Sometimes the monitoring tool is wrong (their probes flag things that real visitors aren't seeing).
2. Check our status page — status.flashcloud.com. If we're showing an outage, we're already on it.
3. If we're not showing an outage — open a ticket with our support team and include the URL that's failing and any error message you see.
4. If we're showing an outage — sit tight, refresh the status page periodically. We'll post updates as we resolve.

For 24/7 critical sites, set up multiple alert channels (email + SMS + Slack) so you don't miss a 3 AM alert because your phone was on silent.

Our status page

status.flashcloud.com shows our infrastructure status:

• Datacenter health.
• Web server health.
• Database health.
• DNS health.
• Email health.

If something's broken, it's posted there with updates as we resolve. Subscribe to email or RSS notifications if you want to be notified of platform-level incidents.

Power-user note

For more sophisticated synthetic monitoring (full user journeys: log in → add to cart → checkout), Pingdom and BetterUptime support multi-step transaction monitors. These can catch failures that a simple homepage check would miss — useful for e-commerce.

For application performance monitoring (slow queries, error tracking, request latency distributions), tools like Sentry, New Relic, or DataDog give you visibility inside your application beyond just "is it up?"