What is uptime? - Definition from Host-tracker

Every person who owns the website wants it to be working well and without any possible issues as much time as possible. In other words, website uptime is one of the most important things for a website from its owner’s perspective. And the same goes for users - they want their favorite website to be accessible every time they want to visit. Moreover, various advertising, promoting and searching services rank websites higher if their uptime ratio is better.

Therefore, it is vital for the webmaster to keep website and server uptime at the highest border. But despite everything mentioned, not every novice webmaster knows the definition of uptime and its measurement. And this is by all means one of the first things every webmaster must know. Simply put, website uptime is the percentage ratio between uptime (online time) and downtime (unavailability time). And it must be as close as possible to 99.99%.

To achieve the letter, the webmaster must understand what is uptime monitoring. In general terms it’s a set of measures and routine performance checks to determine whether a website and its server are running without issues or down and not responding. And without those measures every website owner will suffer a lot of losses. From losing ranks in various aforementioned services to losing future customers, and then money. Simply put, if a website goes down its uptime will lower, its users will leave and related services will one-sidedly suspend the website's subscription and lower its rank in SERP and ads queues.

Downtime, uptime availability of a website

In technical terms, website uptime is a percentage ratio between website or server overall availability period and its downtime or unavailability period. It counts literally every second of a server uptime from first website launch and up to the very exact moment. And it could be as high as 99.99% with a 0.001% margin left for inevitable maintenance downtime as well as server-related first website’s launch issues. So, it must be as close as possible to this mark.

It is worth mentioning that various services count uptime differently for their purposes. Therefore, Google Ads, for example, doesn’t include maintenance downtime of websites and force majeure situations in its ranking measurements if you have a solid proof that it was not a malfunction of software, hardware or website code, for example. But other Ads services or search engines could still count it as a downtime even if you have a server data with timestamps.

Website uptime monitor importance

As it was stated above about what does uptime mean, it is vital to perceive the highest possible uptime ratio of a website in order to promote it and gain an audience. Otherwise, it will certainly lead to various losses that its owner is guaranteed not to want to incur. Therefore, it is important to provide a constant monitoring to check uptime of a website status. And you must monitor your website uptime, not forgetting about other metrics, of course - otherwise you could miss some other issues except the website going down and becoming inaccessible.

If you set up a properly working monitoring sequence (preferably using automated solutions), you will be at a huge advantage if something happens and causes your website to go down. Because you will have a diagnostics results at hand which will be useful for you to check website status, understand what’s happened, pinpoint the source of trouble and fix everything as soon as possible. It will take less time than if you will be doing everything manually.

Therefore, if you monitor website uptime, you will be able to temporarily suspend important subscriptions for ads and promotional services. This way your website won’t lose rankings in queues in every possible service. And, of course, you will minimize the impact on the website’s audience and reputation caused by its downtime. And you won’t suffer from possible revenue loss. In addition, if you apply full-scale real-time website surveillance, you will ultimately secure your website from hacking attempts and DDoS attacks.

Effective uptime website monitoring methods

As it was mentioned already, the best approach to perceiving high uptime ratio and overall website stability, is to use the most effective solutions. And the wisest method to avoid possible losses is to monitor uptime of website along with other metrics using automated service. Using advanced uptime tracker on a well-made monitoring platform like HostTracker to provide round-the-clock surveillance to a website status will bring the best results. Especially when you want to minimize time required to resolve issues and prevent any major losses.

Actually, to simply start uptime monitoring of your website as well as overwatching other metrics using an automated solution like HostTracker, you need to spend a minimal amount of effort. It is as simple as it sounds - you need to register and properly set up routines to monitor the website using all known and suitable specifics. You need to specify the following conditions to run a monitoring routine:

• Website URL and server access port
• Monitoring schedule and intervals
• Scheduled maintenance downtime periods.
• Unusual conditions for alerts, if there are some things tools don’t need to pay attention to.

And you can actually start monitoring your website uptime online.

Considering that this particular service has a worldwide access point network, you can also provide real-time accessibility monitoring from various regions, depending on where your website has more audience. Simply put, you can easily use not only an uptime checker, but any tool available on HostTracker right after a simple configuration sequence.

Its toolkit includes, but not limited to a wide variety of checks and tests from aforementioned uptime monitor and up to DNSBL checks and a lot more. It can even check server hardware and software stability and reboot it if needed. If you provide the system with appropriate admin rights, of course. And you can check uptime of website from all over the world in case an emergency with inaccessibility will occur only for users in particular regions.

In addition to site uptime monitoring and all other tools, HostTracker service has a useful feature to help webmasters with being in touch with website status no matter where they are and what time it is now. This feature is the instant alerts system which provides the webmaster with urgent information about occurring problems with website accessibility, stability or other metrics. This system simply sends a short notification using one of the popular modern messengers or pre-paid SMS message to warn the webmaster about website problems.

Informative uptime monitoring service alerts

Considering that you’ll be using an uptime monitor at HostTracker, you surely will want to know what you can do with the notifications system to be in touch with website status all the time. Therefore, you need to understand that it will not provide you with the most detailed info about occurring problems and test results in one single message.

But you will get the basic information about what happened and where to start looking for the source. Simply put, this alerts system will notify the webmaster in case of emergencies with an uptime website or anything else, but detailed info will be available only after visiting your own dashboard at HostTracker. There you will be able to look at the results of various conducted tests or even give those an additional run just in case.

And you can easily configure notifications service using various contacts and issue escalation systems, as well as multi-user and multi-account systems. It will be possible to define a schedule with No-Alert mode for specific periods of time, connect more than one user to the system in case something worth mentioning to the website owner occurs, and define which issues deserve to be notified about, and which don’t.

Conclusion

Website uptime, as it should be obvious, is one of the most important metrics for almost every aspect of the website. And uptime is connected with those metrics, because if the website went down, it means that something critical happened with the website, server or network. But uptime itself is not only the metric for stability. Also, an indicator of reliability for various advertising and promotional as well as for search engines starting from Google.

Therefore, if you neglect website monitoring and keep your website working without any solid automated solution, you literally put your own money in danger. Because without monitoring you won’t be able to react quickly in case of emergencies. Which means downtime will be longer and probability of suffering from major financial and reputational losses along with users’ dissatisfaction and outflow. And it will lead to even more losses, because you will lose potential customers and possible revenue from those.