Uptime Robot is a free tool used to monitor websites. It’s free version can monitor up to 50 different websites. All you have to do is create a free account on the tool’s website and add the sites you want to check. Uptime Robot will check the availability of sites every 5 minutes by default.
What can you monitor?
Here are the types of monitoring available:
- http(s): that’s perfect for website monitoring. The service regularly sends requests (which are the same as if a visitor is browsing your website) to the URL and decides if it is up or down depending on the HTTP statuses returned from the website (200-success, 404-not found, etc.)
- ping: this is good for monitoring a server. Ping (ICMP) requests are sent and up/down status is decided according to the “if responses are received or not”. Ping is not a good fit for monitoring websites as a website (its IP) can respond to ping requests while it is down (which means that the site is down but the server hosting the site is up)
- keyword: checks if a keyword exists or not exists in a web page
- port: good for monitoring services like smtp, dns, pop as all these services run from a specific port and Uptime Robot decides their statuses if they respond to the requests or not.
How Uptime Robot works?
Here are the step-by-step actions of Uptime Robot to understand it better:
- It asks for your websites headers and gets status codes like “200-ok”, “404-not found”, etc. every 5 minutes (or more depending on the monitor’s settings),
- If the status code doesn’t indicate a problem, we are good
- If the status code is~400+ and 500+, then the site is not loading
- In order to make sure the site is down, Uptime Robot makes several more checks in the next 30 seconds,
- If the site is still down, it sends an alert
How do Uptime Robot notify you when your website goes down?
Depending on our preferences, we may receive different types of notifications.
The most basic of these are:
- Email message
- SMS
- Messages on the designated messenger, e.g. Slack, Microsoft Teams or Discord
- Webhook sent to the designated address
WordPress website monitoring at Esumo
Taking care of our clients’ numerous projects, one of our tasks is to maintain the maximum possible uptime of their websites.
Each of the administered projects, as soon as we take care of it, is added to our dashboard and in 5-minute intervals we monitor whether the site or server is working properly.
When a problem is detected, dedicated members of the team responsible for a particular project get messages on Slack from the bot created there. It allows in a few minutes to react and locate the source of the problem.
As of the writing of this article, the average uptime of the sites we take care of is 99.893% of the time on a monthly basis.
If you have any questions, problems regarding your site or Uptime Robot configuration – we are at your service – write a comment or get back to us directly on email!
