Use an outside monitoring service that checks the site every few minutes and alerts someone who can fix it. A 99.9 percent uptime promise still allows about forty-three minutes offline in a thirty-day month.

The call that tells you

For many small businesses, the outage alarm is a customer. Somebody rings, or mentions it at the counter: the website has not been working.

By then it has often been down for a day or more. Over a long weekend, it can be three.

Most visitors who hit a broken site do not call. They go back to the search results and choose someone else, and nobody ever hears about them.

The customer who does mention it is the exception, which is why waiting for that call is a poor way to find out.

Why owners are the last to know

Owners rarely visit their own website. They know the hours and the phone number, so they have no reason to look.

When they do look, it is often at a tab left open since yesterday, which shows the page as it was rather than as it is.

And many failures are partial. The home page loads, but the contact form fails, or the site works on the office network and not on a phone.

None of that is carelessness. A website simply fails where its owner is not looking.

What monitoring does

An uptime monitoring service checks the site from outside, around the clock, and sends an alert when it fails.

The fourth is the one simple checks miss. A suspended account notice, a registrar's parking page after a domain lapses, or a database error can all pass a check that only asks whether something answered.

What 99.9 percent actually allows

Hosting plans often promise 99.9 percent uptime. It sounds like always.

In a thirty-day month, the remaining tenth of a percent is about forty-three minutes. Over a year, that adds up to nearly nine hours.

The promise holds even if a month's minutes arrive all at once, on your busiest morning.

A promise of 99.5 percent allows about three and a half hours a month. Ninety-nine percent allows more than seven.

Read the terms too. Planned maintenance is often excluded, the host usually does the measuring, and the remedy is typically a credit on next month's bill, not compensation for lost business.

A guarantee is not a monitor

An uptime guarantee is a promise about refunds. It does not tell you when the site is down.

It also measures the server, not your website. A site broken by a faulty plugin update, an expired certificate or a full storage allowance can be down for visitors while its server counts as up.

Those are the failures small business sites actually have, and only a check that looks at your pages from outside will catch them.

A worked example

A laundromat that also runs a pickup and delivery service had its website start showing a database error early on the Saturday of a long weekend.

Nobody at the laundromat looked at the site until Tuesday, when a delivery customer mentioned to the driver that the pickup booking form had not worked for days.

The cause was mundane. Backup archives were being saved inside the hosting account itself, and they had filled its disk space until the database could no longer write.

The fix had three parts: backups moved to storage outside the account, a warning for disk space, and monitoring that checks the pickup booking page for a phrase from the form every five minutes.

Alerts now go by text to the manager who schedules the pickup route and by email to the web company that maintains the site.

Who should get the alert

An alert is only useful if it reaches someone who can act, at a time they will see it.

The person who can fix it comes first: whoever maintains the site, or the host if they look after it. They need the alert directly, not forwarded on Monday.

Someone in the business should get it too, so they know before customers start calling and can decide what to tell them.

A shared inbox nobody watches at weekends is the wrong destination. So is the personal email of somebody who left last year.

Text or email

Not every alert needs to wake anyone up.

A site that is completely down deserves a text message. A certificate expiring in three weeks, or a page that has slowed down, can wait for email.

Too many urgent alerts and people stop reading them. Have the service confirm a failure twice before texting anyone, so a brief network wobble does not wake someone at midnight.

And name a second person for holidays. An alert sent to someone on a beach with no signal is an alert nobody received.

When the alert arrives

The first minutes are for confirming and recording, not fixing.

Open the site on a phone using mobile data, not the office network, to rule out a local problem. Note the time and what the page shows, ideally with a screenshot.

Then contact whoever maintains the site with that information. The difference between a database error, a certificate warning and a blank page tells them where to start.

Keep a simple log of each incident and its cause. Three entries in a year with the same cause is a conversation to have with your host.

The counter-case

Text alerts are not for every site.

A small brochure site that rarely changes and takes no bookings can manage with email alerts and a weekly summary. An hour of downtime there costs little.

And monitoring prevents nothing. It shortens the time between a failure and someone knowing, which decides most of the damage, but the site still needs looking after.

For any site that takes enquiries, bookings or orders, monitor it from outside and send the alert to someone able to act on it.

This week

  1. Ask your web company whether the site is monitored.
  2. Find out who currently receives the alerts.
  3. Monitor your most important page as well.
  4. Add a phrase check for that page.
  5. Send outage alerts by text to two people.
  6. Watch certificate and domain expiry dates.
  7. Read your host's uptime terms.

Step two is the one that catches the quiet failure. Monitoring set up years ago can still be sending alerts to an address nobody reads, which is the same as having none.

Whether monitoring is already part of what you pay for is covered in what a hosting plan includes and what it does not.

Frequently asked questions

How do most owners find out their site is down?

From a customer, often days later. Most visitors who hit a broken site simply leave for someone else, so the one who mentions it is the exception.

What does uptime monitoring actually do?

It checks your site from outside every few minutes, confirms failures from a second location, and alerts named people by text or email when the site stops working.

How much downtime does 99.9 percent allow?

About forty-three minutes in a thirty-day month, or nearly nine hours over a year. The promise holds even if a month's minutes arrive all at once, at your busiest time.

Why check for a phrase on the page?

Because a suspended account notice, a registrar's parking page or a database error can pass a check that only asks whether something answered.

Who should receive the alerts?

Whoever can fix the site, directly, and someone in the business who can tell customers. Not a shared inbox nobody reads at weekends, and not a former employee.

Does an uptime guarantee protect my business?

Not really. It measures the server rather than your site, often excludes planned maintenance, and usually pays a credit on your bill rather than any compensation.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

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