Website Uptime Monitoring: Free Tools and What Our 3-Year Report Showed
In July 2012 we looked back at three years of uptime data after moving QuickOnlineTips to KnownHost. A free Pingdom account had recorded 65 downtimes totalling 1 day, 3 hours and 45 minutes, most of it from one spike in 2011, for an overall uptime of 99.89%. Website uptime monitoring is still the simplest way to know your site is down before your readers tell you. Here’s how to set it up free in 2026.
Quick answer: Sign up for a free monitor such as UptimeRobot or Better Stack, add your homepage URL as an HTTP(S) check, and turn on email or app alerts. The service checks your site every few minutes from several locations and alerts you when it’s down. Add a keyword check to catch error pages that still return “200 OK”.
Table of Contents
Free website uptime monitoring tools
- UptimeRobot: generous free plan with 5-minute checks, email and app alerts, and public status pages.
- Better Stack: free tier with uptime checks, incident alerts and status pages.
- Jetpack Monitor: free downtime alerts for WordPress sites connected to Jetpack.
- Your host or CDN: many include basic uptime alerts or health checks.
Pingdom, which we used in 2012, is now a paid service.
How to set up monitoring
- Create a free account and add a new HTTP(S) monitor for your homepage.
- Add a second monitor for an important page or your wp-login.php.
- Use a keyword monitor that looks for a word on the page, to catch database errors.
- Set alert contacts: email, mobile push, or Slack/Telegram.
- Optionally publish a status page for readers or clients.
What uptime percentages mean
- 99.9%: about 8.8 hours of downtime a year.
- 99.95%: about 4.4 hours a year.
- 99.99%: about 53 minutes a year.
Our 99.89% in 2012 equalled roughly 9.5 hours a year, mostly from one bad incident.
When downtime happens
- Check whether it’s just you (another network or a down-checker site).
- Look at your host’s status page and error logs.
- Learn from past outages: how I fixed 36 hours of internal server errors.
- Consider faster, more reliable hosting such as SSD VPS hosting.
FAQ
How often should uptime be checked?
Every 1-5 minutes is typical; free plans often check every 5 minutes.
Does downtime hurt SEO?
Short outages don’t, but repeated or long downtime can reduce crawling and rankings.
What’s a good uptime for a blog?
Aim for 99.9% or better.
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I always thought my hosting company monitored my website, and found out the hard way! I now use monitorhub, http://www.monitorhub.com it was really simple to set up as I’m not that technical but need to know my website is working. The service I use is free, but they offer SMS alerts on the paid service.
Great article and couldn’t agree more. Always surprised by how many people spend all their time and resources on building a “Rolls Royce” website but don’t spend any time on firstly choosing the right hosting service and then on maintaining the site.
Your site cannot earn any money when it’s down (and how many customer’s will return having visited and found it down!), and longer term it could impact on your search rankings. There really is no excuse therefore not to use a service like Pingdom or StatusCake.com – https://www.statuscake.com/ – which is completely free and allows unlimited websites to be added and monitored.
“the total downtime over 3 years has been a total of about 15 hours” – the image says 1 day 3 hours and 45 mins.. not 15 hours.
Also small network outages isn’t calculated when you have 15 mins resolution. the downtime can actually be much higher than shown above
Thanks Lucas for pointing that out. Fixed it. Tried to oversimplify and got the maths wrong :-)
Thanks for mentioning us and our service :)
Always amazed with Pingdom and it keeps getting better.