Disclosure: WHSR is reader-supported. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.
Reliability and consistency are vital for online businesses. The statistic shows that the average cost of network downtime can get up to $5,600 per minute. Without proper monitoring measures, websites experience around 3 hours of unplanned downtime every month.
Site stability is also crucial for bloggers, because various search engines factor it during ranking. Therefore, in order to boost reach and conversion rates you need to monitor your uptime. Want to know about the best ways to do it?
Below, you’ll find out how to perform website availability tests on-the-go. Don’t worry about complexity. We promise that you don’t need to be a tech guru to follow our tips.
Can Your Website Sustain Heavy Traffic Load? One way to find out: Stress test your website with thousands of concurrent connections using Loadview. No coding required, 30 days free trial, test on 40+ real browsers & devices, and free $20 test credit now > Click Here
Best Ways to Test If a Website is Down
Every once in a while, we all come across a portal that won’t load. Immediately, a question emerges in your head: “Is this website down, or have I lost my Internet connection?” You try going to other sites, and all of them seem to be working fine. What’s seems to be a problem?
Here’s another example. Let’s imagine that one of the online services you frequently use stopped working all of a sudden. You think it’s just temporary offline and tomorrow everything is going to be fine. Yet tomorrow comes, and the site still won’t load.
What’s the best way to uncover the cause of these problems?
You’ll be pleased to know that there are plenty of ways to check the status of any website. We are going to tell you about each one: from classic methods to utilizing specialized tools like website down checkers. Let’s dive in!
Basics
Many people prefer to skip over standard resolution measures and go straight to more complex ones. We recommend not rushing and trying to do the following instead:
Try visiting other sites Facebook or YouTube refuses to load? For starters, try going to other domains to check if you have access to the Web.
Check the Internet connection You might be surprised, but a significant percentage of connectivity issues come down to accidental cord unplugging. Therefore, you should look if your server (or router) is hooked up correctly.
Connect from other browsers, devices, and networks You already reconnected all cords and rebooted your router, yet your site still won’t load? Then try using other browsers to connect. Doesn’t work either? Try to reach the URL from your mobile device. If nothing helps – switch to another Wi-Fi network and repeat.
Use a VPN Sometimes, owners restrict access to their portals to specific providers or regions. Want to verify that a website doesn’t block you? Then try using a different VPN server (preferably from another country).
Turn off extensions As a last resort, you can temporarily disable browser extensions. Try visiting a site in question without an ad blocker, and the result may surprise you.
Command (Terminal)
There’s an old proven way to check website status and gauge your ping with command lines.
Windows – You have to open a Command Prompt. You can do this by pressing the “Windows” button and typing “cmd.” Then, type in “ping” and add a URL of a website you want to test.
Mac OS – Type in “Network Utility” into the Spotlight to find the Ping tool. Just enter the IP address or website link you want to test out and hit “Enter.”
Linux – Press “Ctlr” + “Alt” + “T” buttons on your keyboard. From here on, the process is identical to the one in Windows.
You’ll see results in under a minute. If your site is offline, you’ll see an error with a “request timed out” message.
Website Down Checker Tools
What should you do to make sure that a website is accessible from every corner of the world? We have an effective and simple solution for you.
With website status checker tools, you can quickly test the availability of any portal with servers from all over the globe. That way, you can also find out if access to a specific site is blocked in your country.
If you want to maximize your platform’s reach and uptime – you should make use of web monitoring tools. They offer in-depth information about your website performance and notify you in case it experiences connectivity problems.
How to Check & Track Status of Any Website
Using website status checkers is the easiest way to find out about the cause of your connection problems. Let’s go through the most popular services you can try out right now.
If you’d like to see uptime monitoring done in-depth then look no further than dotcom-monitor. They offer a complete range of monitoring features but split them up so you can choose the elements you need and pay for only those. Their uptime monitoring service includes response validation, access to a web API, and even retains three years’ worth of data – all for only $19.95/mo.
CurrentlyDown shows information about any portal’s availability over the course of the last 30 days. On the main page, it offers insight about the latest notable outages of larger websites, as well as platforms that experienced recent downtime.
This free tool also features a live outage map, so you can see what regions of the world can’t asses the site at the moment. Aside from that, CurrentlyDown highlights the most notable outages portal has experienced during recent years.
This is a popular online service that can check the availability of any website from over 35 servers located over the world. Uptime provides real-life data, as well as detailed uptime statistics for up to one month.
Uptime is not only a website down checker. This tool also provides DNS info, WHOIS checkup, and notifies you in case it finds any spam or malware on the platform.
Aside from that, this tool can be used to monitor your own portal. Uptime is a great choice for medium-sized businesses and enterprises due to its wide variety of features. It monitors your website and alerts you if something stops workings. Thus, you can effectively eliminate any unplanned downtime.
StatusCake goes beyond the “ping to see if it’s alive” norm of website uptime monitoring. It has a complete suite of performance monitoring tools that can keep an eye on everything from page speed to server resource consumption and SSL status.
The free plan gets more limited access and excludes the server monitor. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shop for website monitoring, this is the one for you. Paid plans cost $20.41 or $66.66/mo.
Not to be confused with Microsoft’s prototype software HostTracker, Host-Tracker is a comprehensive website monitoring service. The service has 140 nodes and multiple monitor points from all over the world. Host-Tracker comes in several different language package – Italian, English, Spanish, and Greek. The Free plan covers up to 2 website monitors (checks at 30 minutes interval); for paid plans, it covers up to 150 website monitors and nine different checking methods.
At time of writing, Host Tracker is monitoring more than 300,000 websites from 140+ locations. Their entry plan starts at $3.25/mo if you subscribe for a year.
Uptime Robot checks your sites every five minutes or so and if the site does not ping back, the program will e-mail you a message that your sites are down. The best thing about Uptime Robot is that it's completely free for your first 50 monitors. During the early days of WHSR, I used Uptime Robot to track my test sites' uptime.
Freshping is an useful tool that you can use to automatically monitor your site performance and publish your site status online. The system constantly checks your site every minute to see if it’s down and if so, will alert you via Slack, Twilio, and email.
Freshping free plan allows 50 checks at 1 minute interval and 6 months data retention. Paid users get to setup advanced alerting and store server performance data for up to 24 months.
This service is pretty self-explanatory. One of your favorite places appears to be offline? Just type the name of the website you want to get tested and press “Check.” IsItDownRightNow will undertake a quick free analysis and tell you if the site is online.
IsItDownRightNow also provides some extra data. For example, you can see a list of similar sites and a community rating. IsItDownRightNow also shows detailed website uptime history, telling you about the last times the portal was offline.
DownForEveryoneOrJustMe is a straightforward ping site that does exactly what you think it would. That is, it shows if the portal that you’re attempting to access is offline, or if something in your network prevents you from reaching it.
This site doesn’t have any additional useful tools or features. It also doesn’t show any reasons for why you can’t access a website. Still, you’ll find DownForEveryoneOrJustMe useful if you want to check website status really quick and make sure that the problem is not on your side.
It seems that Google always finds its way into any list. And this top is no exception. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an incredibly popular website analyzer that can check website status quickly.
Just enter the name of a platform you want to check, and PageSpeedInsights will tell you if it’s accessible. This tool won’t tell you about the reasons you can’t reach a website in question if it fails to load. If the site is up for everyone except you – then you’ll get a positive result and an exhaustive report. It includes various data about a portal, including page load times, app performance statistics, as well as suggestions for speed improvement.
Monitor Scout helps monitor websites availability from 15 different locations and runs checks on HTTP, HTTPS, PING, mySQL, MS SQL, IMAP, POP3, DNS, etc upt to every one minute interval. Users get email and SMS alerts in case of server outage; detailed reports including uptime, latency, and in-depth analysis are provided.
Got Site Monitor Free plan covers up to 5 URLs, 20 SMS alerts on signup, and unlimited email alerts. Website check (monitoring interval) is done every 10 minutes for Free Plan, every 1 minute for Paid Plans. The users get to track websites uptime from different locations, including Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and China.
Do you want to reduce unplanned downtime to a minimum? ServiceUptime allows you to monitor your portal from virtually anywhere in the world.
This is an advanced online monitoring service that checks your website’s uptime round the clock. ServiceUptime immediately notifies you via email or SMS in case something goes wrong.
All of its features are available for free, as well as for the premium subscription. And it’s an extremely useful tool even when you don’t pay for it. However, the premium version is where it really shines.
For a reasonable price, ServiceUptime is going to check your portal every minute from up to 210 places all over the world so you can address incoming issues right away. You can also try premium functionality for free with a 14-day trial.
Basic State is a free service that helps track unlimited number of websites on 15 minutes check frequency. Downtime alerts are sent out from BasicState via email or text message; daily reports are available for 14 days history.
Do you want to keep an eye out for the availability of the Internet’s most popular portals? Then, DownRightNow is just what you need. It’s a crowd-sourced website down checker for the largest social media networks and online services.
This free tool offers 24/7 web monitoring of giants like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, and many other services. You also get information about the stability and latest downtime of each website. Additionally, DownRightNow also allows users to report about outages.
Another useful free web service to check website status. Simply enter any URL you want to analyze, and DownInspector will provide you with results.
Even though it’s straightforward, DownInspector still offers more functionality than basic ping sites like DownforEveryoneOrJustMe. For example, it shows an uptime report for the last day and a map with countries that have trouble accessing the site. DownInspector also allows users to submit reports about problems with the availability of any website.
With Site24x7, you can test website accessibility from over 60 servers located worldwide. But that’s not all. This tool has many other features to offer.
Site24x7 shows a DNS resolve time, first- and last-byte time, as well as total response time for any site. In addition to uptime checkups, this tool can perform an in-depth website analysis, which includes server, network, as well as cloud infrastructure monitoring. These features are accessible with a monthly subscription. However, you can try Site24x7 advanced functionality for free with a 30-day trial.
Downtime Report is a website down checker that offers in-depth website monitoring. It gathers data from over the world to test accessibility and uptime of a selected number of websites.
This is another community-driven tool that monitors over 650 popular online services 24/7 while allowing users to report outages directly to developers. Click on one of the portals in the lists that interest you, and Downtime Report will compile a status report for up to the last 90 days.
Additionally, you can suggest new sites for web monitoring if you can’t find them on the list.
Pingdom, now owned and managed by Solarwinds, repackaged their services and comes in subscription model. At $10 per month, you'll get 10 uptime, page speed, and transaction checks and 50 SMS alert.
Uptrends is a fantastic website uptime and performance monitoring service with advanced functionality. It has a clean and customizable dashboard so you can have a better understanding of what’s going on in your website in real-time.
Uptrends demonstrates essential stats about your site and provides tools for measuring uptime and performance.
You should know that this service isn’t free. However, it offers a free 30-day trial. Want to see how Uptrends can maximize your site’s uptime? Then feel free to try this tool free of charge.
Looking for an excellent automated website analyzer for your portal? Fyipe is another paid-only monitoring service that effectively reduces unplanned downtime.
This is an outstanding tool for businesses that strive to have full control over their websites, as well as API and IoT devices. Fyipe provides full information about your platform’s outages and shows essential website statistics. Needless to say, it will immediately notify you or your team about availability issues via call, VoIP services, email, or integrated applications.
As you search for a web host, you’ll undoubtedly come across the term “uptime” and all sorts of guarantees surrounding it. But what does it actually mean – and why does it matter?
What is Uptime?
Uptime is the amount of time that your website is up and running.
Uptime is good – when your site is “up”, visitors can access your website smoothly.
Downtime, on the opposite, is bad. When your site is “down”, it means that people can’t reach your site – which can be frustrating and leave a bad image for your website. Additionally, if people aren't able to reach your site the first time, they may not try again.
“Uptime Guarantees” is promises made by hosting companies to have your site up for X % of time in a day. A 99.9% uptime guarantee means the provider guarantee that your website is accessible at least 23.976 hours (0.999 x 24) a day.
Why Monitor Your Website Uptime?
Two main reasons why you need to monitor your website uptime:
To react quickly and minimize the damage when your site goes down; and
To confirm that your web host is delivering their promises.
Sure – any good web host will monitor and keep track of their server uptime. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do your part as a web hosting users. The more eyes and ears you have, the better.
Our new site HostScore.net runs on its own monitoring system and publish latest server uptime and speed data on site. This screenshot shows past 30 days uptime for A2 Hosting.
Reliability and consistency are vital for online businesses. The statistic shows that the average cost of network downtime can get up to $5,600 per minute. Without proper monitoring measures, websites experience around 3 hours of unplanned downtime every month.
Site stability is also crucial for bloggers, because various search engines factor it during ranking. Therefore, in order to boost reach and conversion rates you need to monitor your uptime. Want to know about the best ways to do it?
Types of Uptime Monitoring Tools
There are dozens, if not more, of uptime monitoring tools available online – some are free and some cost upwards of thousands of dollars annually.
Some run simple HTTP checks to confirm whether your site is running, while others perform very complex back-end jobs to monitor more than 50 checkpoints simultaneously.
The various tools run every end of the spectrum, which can be a bit overwhelming to users, but also ensures that there is a tool out there to fit your needs and budget.
Regardless of which uptime monitoring tool you go with, it will fit into one of the four types of monitoring: Ping monitor, HTTP monitor, DNS Server Monitor, and TCP port monitor.
1. Ping Monitor
A Ping monitor basically pings your website to confirm that it’s there and up and running.
Think of ping like a virtual ping pong ball; if you serve the ball to a wall, it should hit that wall and come back to you – if the wall is down, the ball isn’t able to connect. Same with a ping monitor – if your site is down, it senses the missing connection and notifies you.
This type of monitoring typically goes a bit above simply letting you know if your site is up, however – it does also provide insight into internet connection speeds and downtime statistics. The connection speed is an important factor, because slow websites are not much better than down sites for visitors, not to mention that slow speeds hurt your Google search rankings.
2. HTTP Monitor
We use HTTP to transfer data online, using set rules that tell the servers and web browsers which information to exchange. Because it is involved in the constant information exchange that occurs, HTTP monitors provide information about the HTTP traffic between the internet and computer. Advanced settings allow users to glean additional insights, such as whether an SSL certificate is in place.
3. DNS Server Monitor
Every computer corresponds with a numerical address; the DNS protocol translates the online address to the numerical address. By matching the information and running behind the scenes monitoring of the addresses, the DNS server monitor is able to provide in-depth information about uptime, protocol failures, network outages, and more. Particularly important, should a numerical address mismatch with the online address, the DNS is able to sense it and report the error which may be a result of hijacking.
4. TCP Port Monitor
The Transmission Control Protocol – or TCP, for short, transfers data from one network device to another network device, using a retransmission strategy to ensure that there isn’t any data loss that occurs during each transmission. Since it is part of quality monitoring and has a hand in establishing host-to-host communications, it becomes apparent quite quickly if there is a connection problem. Should a TCP port fail to respond or receive transmitted information, the monitor will alert the user of the failed or faulty transmission.
It is incredibly important to monitor your site’s uptime to make it successful. There are constant threats in the cyber world and working with a great host who carefully monitors uptime and employs great defenses proactively is the first step; taking secondary measures to monitor yourself is the second and both are equally important.
Which Uptime Monitor Service to Use?
A few key factors to look into when you are choosing an uptime monitor service are:
What is the interval between each check?
How is the alert messages sent out?
What reporting option does the system provide?
What is the price? Do you really need a paid tracking service?
Pro Tips
As per my experience in the industry, monitoring a server or a webpage is not enough to ensure a bullet-proof situation for your business.
Several other aspects need to be monitored. To say for example, your e-commerce store is being affected due to downtime or some other issue; you are losing customers and making a loss. The most feasible solution is monitoring the web pages, the login page, database, hosting server, hardware components, and the vital applications. Choose the monitoring tool that packs in all these opportunities.
When the user finds it difficult to choose between 2 or 3 monitoring companies, the user should contact the customer support of those companies to check if free trial version of their services is available. . All major monitoring companies should be able to offer this to customers that are in the evaluation process.
– Johan, Monitor Scout CEO.
Final Thoughts on Tracking Website Uptime Status
It’s annoying when you can’t access someone else’s website. However, when your own website is down – it could be a costly threat to your business. Especially if you have no idea that it’s inaccessible for some regions.
As mentioned – there are various ways to check and monitor your website uptime – PHP scripts, free browser tool or even Google Sheets and Gmail are some of the free options available. However, as website monitoring (and data processing after you have collected those data) is an ongoing and tedious process – it's most practical to use an automated server monitoring tool.
Your Website is Down, Now What?
There are a number of reasons that could cause a website to go down. Here are a few immediate things you can do when your site is down:
Double check your site uptime with our easy manual Uptime Checker.
Did you change any part of your website recently? A sloppy .htaccess typo or a new plugin that requires a lot of server memory may crush your server. Try undo those changes and restore your website.
Alert your web host about the problem – send in reports you have got from the monitoring service (if any). Don’t leap to the assumption that your hosting provider is aware of the problem.
Have an ice cream and wait for your web host to respond.
Switch to a different web host if the problem persists.
FAQs on Uptime & Website Down Checkers
What are uptime checks?
Uptime checks are the queries sent by uptime monitoring services or applications to your server. These checks are helpful as a part of website monitoring activities. Strategically, you can also use uptime checks to gauge long-term web hosting server reliability.
How do I check if a website is down?
The easiest way to check if a website is down is to use one of the many online services. These tools will also let you know how long the site has been down and how many other users have complained about it being unavailable. One example is www.isitdownrightnow.com.
What causes website down?
The reasons for a website going down can range from something as simple as a web hosting problem to an outage across the entire internet. Other potential causes for websites being down is excessively high web traffic or even a possible ongoing DDoS attack.
How do you fix a downed website?
The first thing you should do is try calling the company that hosts your website. If their services are regular, move your focus towards changes you may have recently made. For example, WordPress plugin updates can sometimes cause website problems.
How can I check if my website is working?
There are several ways to check if your website is working as it should. Some of the best ways are online tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, or Pingdom. Another option is to use developer insights on Google Chrome – just press F12 to see if there are errors or warnings.
How long are websites usually down?
The amount of downtime depends on how quickly website owners can rectify problems. For example, replacing server hardware can be faster than identifying and fixing a system bug. Thanks to automated website monitoring tools, most website downtime is usually low.
Why do big websites go down?
There are many reasons why big websites go down. The most common is the failure of a server or network connection. Other possible causes include human error, denial of service attacks, and maintenance schedules.
How does website down checker work?
Uptime monitoring typically involves an external service that sends a simple query to your web hosting server at periodical intervals. If a website down checker gets no response from the test site, a “server down” log is recorded. The downtime is then calculated from that point until the server eventually sends an acknowledgment to further queries.
How do you calculate uptime?
Uptime is calculated by taking the total time your web host is down and dividing it by the total duration of the monitoring period. You can then convert this downtime percentage into uptime by subtracting it from 100%. For example, if your server is down for 20 minutes over two days, the uptime is 99.993%.
