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Websites go down more often than most owners realise — sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours. If your site is down when a customer searches for you or clicks an ad, you lose that enquiry (and still pay for the click). Monitoring tells you immediately, and a simple checklist helps you fix it fast.
Set up free monitoring
Uptime monitoring services check your website every few minutes and alert you by email, SMS or app notification when it's unreachable. Many offer free plans suitable for small businesses (for example UptimeRobot, Better Stack or similar services). Monitor:
- Your homepage
- Your main landing page used in ads
- A page that uses the database (to catch database failures)
- SSL certificate expiry (many tools offer this)
Common causes of downtime
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| "This site can't be reached" / DNS error | Domain expired, DNS records changed, nameserver issue |
| "Connection timed out" | Server down or overloaded |
| 500 Internal Server Error | Code error, broken .htaccess, PHP version change |
| 503 / 508 errors | Server overloaded or resource limits reached |
| Database connection error | Database server down, wrong credentials, too many connections |
| Certificate error | SSL expired or misconfigured |
| Account suspended page | Billing issue or hosting policy violation (e.g., malware) |
What to do when the site is down
- Confirm it's down for everyone (use a "down for everyone or just me" checker or a different network).
- Check domain expiry and DNS.
- Check your hosting status page and email for outages or suspension notices.
- Check recent changes: did anyone edit files, update plugins, or change PHP version? Roll back.
- Check error logs in the hosting panel.
- Contact hosting support with the exact error and time.
- Pause ads if the outage will last a while.
- Restore from backup if files were corrupted or hacked.
Prevent downtime
- Auto-renew domain and hosting.
- Test updates on a staging copy first.
- Keep regular off-site backups.
- Choose reliable hosting with good support.
- Avoid editing live files without a backup.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does short downtime hurt SEO?
Brief outages usually don't. Long or frequent downtime can affect crawling and rankings.
What uptime should I expect from hosting?
Good hosts aim for 99.9% or higher, which still allows some minutes of downtime per month.
Should I monitor my website myself?
Automated monitoring is far more reliable — it checks every few minutes, day and night.
Need reliable hosting and support?
Joboo Web offers monitored hosting and maintenance. See our maintenance checklist or hosting plans.