Every website goes down eventually. The question is whether you find out from your monitoring system or from a customer support ticket. Setting up basic uptime monitoring is free, takes less than ten minutes, and can save you significant revenue and reputation damage.
What to monitor
Start with your homepage and any critical user paths: login page, checkout page, API health endpoint, and any page that generates revenue directly. There is no benefit to monitoring every page — focus on the paths that matter.
For most small to medium sites, monitoring three to five endpoints covers the important failure modes. A good monitoring set for an e-commerce site: the homepage, the product listing page, the checkout page, and a lightweight /health API endpoint that returns 200 if the application is running correctly.
How often to check
Check intervals determine your alert latency — how quickly you find out about downtime. A one-minute check interval means you could be down for up to 59 seconds before your monitor detects it.
For most sites, one-minute checks are a good balance. High-traffic sites with SLA obligations might use 30-second checks. Personal projects and blogs can get away with five-minute checks.
Be aware: very frequent checks from a single location are not equivalent to real user monitoring. A site can be reachable from your monitoring server's location while being inaccessible to users in a specific geographic region.
Free monitoring options
WebsiteDown offers free status checks for any domain — run a manual check anytime to verify your site is up. For automated monitoring with alerts, the WebsiteDown Pro plan provides continuous checks with email and Telegram notifications.
Other free options include UptimeRobot (free tier includes five monitors at five-minute intervals), Better Uptime (free for one monitor), and StatusCake (free with limited check frequency). GitHub Actions can also be used to run scheduled HTTP checks against your site using free CI minutes.
For API monitoring, many developers use Postman Monitors (free tier available) or write lightweight scripts that run as cron jobs on a small cloud VM.
When to upgrade to paid monitoring
Free monitoring is sufficient for personal projects and small sites. As your site grows or becomes business-critical, consider upgrading when: you need checks more frequent than what the free tier offers, you need monitoring from multiple geographic locations simultaneously (to catch regional issues), you need SSL certificate expiry monitoring, or you need SLA reporting for customer commitments.
The cost of a monitoring subscription is trivially small compared to the revenue impact of even one undetected hour of downtime on a site with meaningful traffic.