Uptime monitoring for agencies and freelancers who look after client sites

Why agencies monitor client sites

When a client's site goes down, the agency usually gets the blame whether or not it caused the problem, and finding out from the client is the worst way to learn about it. Monitoring every site you build or maintain lets you spot outages first, fix them or escalate to the host, and show clients evidence of the uptime you deliver.

Monitoring also turns into a service you can offer. Many agencies and freelancers include uptime monitoring, incident response and a monthly report in a care or maintenance plan, and the data from Uptime Tracker backs it up:

• Time-weighted availability per site, excluding agreed maintenance windows.
• Incident history with timelines showing when you were alerted and when you responded.
• Response time trends that show the effect of hosting upgrades or performance work.
• Certificate validity on every HTTPS check and, on Starter, domain-expiry warnings, two things clients often forget to renew.

Before launching a care plan, decide what you will commit to: which sites, how fast you respond, and in which hours. Then configure Uptime Tracker to match, with routing rules that send alerts in those hours to the people on duty.

Organizing clients with projects, tags and routing

Projects are the main way to separate clients in Uptime Tracker: each project groups its own monitors and status pages and can be shared with that client's guest viewers on Team. Starter includes 3 projects and Team includes 10.

A structure that scales well:

• One project per client on Team, or per client group on Starter.
• Tags for cross-cutting attributes, such as care-plan, wordpress, critical or the hosting provider name.
• Routing rules on Starter and Team that use tags and time windows: send critical monitors to SMS for whoever is on duty, everything else to a shared Slack or Teams channel.

Tagging by hosting provider pays off during a provider outage: you can see at a glance which clients are affected. On Team, monitor dependencies can suppress alerts for sites behind a shared server that is down, so one server outage produces one alert.

If you outgrow 10 projects, you can still group several small clients into one project using tags, and larger plans are planned. Team's 50 standard monitors cover roughly 15 to 25 client sites at two or three checks each, such as a homepage, a key page and a DNS or domain monitor.

Giving clients visibility: guest viewers and status pages

Clients trust what they can see. Uptime Tracker gives them two ways to see the state of their sites without access to your other clients.

Guest viewers on Team. Invite up to 20 read-only guest viewers, each limited to a single project. A client contact can sign in, see their own monitors, uptime and incidents, and nothing else. Guest viewers do not use your 10 login seats.

Status pages per client. Team includes 10 status pages and Starter 3. Each can be served on the client's domain, such as status.clientname.com: you or the client adds a TXT record to prove ownership and a CNAME record, and the HTTPS certificate is issued automatically. For clients who want an internal-only view, Team supports password-protected private pages.

Status pages show a small "Powered by Uptime Tracker" line. See status pages for setup.

Reporting uptime to clients

Scheduled email reports on Starter and Team send a weekly or monthly uptime summary automatically, which is the easiest way to show clients the value of a care plan. Forward it to the client or include it in your own monthly update.

What makes a useful client report:

• Availability per site for the period, with planned maintenance excluded.
• Incidents with start, acknowledgement and resolution times.
• Response time, especially before and after any optimization work you did.

For custom reports, export availability, incidents or check results as CSV on any plan and build your own summary. Aggregated history is kept for 180 days on Starter and 395 days on Team, so annual reviews are possible on Team.

Agree on maintenance windows with each client and schedule them in Uptime Tracker. Recurring weekly windows on Starter and Team suit regular update slots, and the time is excluded from availability so routine plugin updates do not hurt the numbers you report.

Onboarding your client sites

You can move a whole client list into Uptime Tracker in an afternoon.

1. Sign in and start the 14-day Team trial; no card is needed.
2. Create a project per client.
3. Import sites with a CSV file, or import an Uptime Kuma JSON backup if you used Kuma. HTTP, keyword, port, ping, DNS, push and gRPC monitors are mapped, and unsupported types are reported.
4. Add keyword checks to each homepage so broken pages that still return 200 OK are caught.
5. Add domain-expiry monitors for each client domain with a 60 to 90-day warning, since renewals often depend on the client.
6. Tag monitors and set up routing rules.
7. Create status pages and invite client guest viewers where useful.
8. Schedule monthly reports.

The REST API and monctl CLI help if you provision new client sites often; see developers and DevOps. A short onboarding checklist per new client keeps every site monitored the same way from day one.

Which plan fits an agency or freelancer?

Freelancers with two or three small client sites fit Starter: 10 monitors cover three sites with a homepage check, a key page and a domain-expiry monitor each, and scheduled reports support a care plan. Freelancers with more clients, and agencies offering client access and branded status pages, fit Team, where guest viewers, private pages and 10 projects keep clients cleanly separated.

The cost of either plan is usually recovered by adding monitoring to a single client's maintenance retainer. Start with the 14-day Team trial to set up projects, guest viewers and status pages, then choose the plan that matches your client count. Downgrading never deletes data. See pricing.