Uptime monitoring for small businesses without an IT department

Why a small business needs uptime monitoring

Most small businesses find out their website is down when a customer tells them, often days later. Uptime monitoring checks your site every few minutes and alerts you within minutes of a confirmed problem, so you can call your web host or developer before you lose bookings or enquiries.

The problems small businesses run into are rarely dramatic hacks. They are ordinary:

• The hosting account was suspended because a card expired.
• A plugin update broke the contact form or online booking page.
• The SSL certificate expired and browsers now show a security warning.
• The domain registration lapsed, taking the website and email down together.
• Someone changed DNS settings while setting up a new tool, and email stopped arriving.

Each of these can be detected automatically. Uptime Tracker checks for all of them with a few monitors, and the alerts say in plain language what failed, for example "connection timed out" or "certificate expired", so you can forward them straight to whoever looks after your website.

You do not need to understand servers to use it. If you can copy your website address, you can set up monitoring.

What to monitor: a checklist for a typical small business

For a typical small business, six to ten monitors cover everything that matters. The Free plan's two monitors cover the essentials: your homepage and your booking or contact page. Starter's 10 cover the full checklist below, including domain expiry.

Keyword checks are important for small business sites built on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or similar platforms. When something breaks, these platforms often still show a page, just the wrong one, such as an error message or a "site suspended" notice. Checking for your business name catches that.

Learn more about each type on the website monitoring, DNS monitoring and domain-expiry monitoring pages.

Getting alerts the way you work

Uptime Tracker sends alerts to the place you will actually see them, and only after a problem is confirmed by two consecutive failed checks, so you are not bothered by one-second glitches.

• Email on every plan. Add a second address, such as your web developer's, and they confirm it with one click.
• SMS on Starter, to verified mobile numbers in 231 countries. You buy prepaid credit in packages of 50, 100 or 250 messages, and the price for your country is shown before you pay, so there are no surprise bills.
• Microsoft Teams or Google Chat on Starter, if your business already uses one of them.
• Slack on every plan.

A sensible setup for a business owner: email for everything, SMS only for the homepage and booking page. On Starter, routing rules can limit SMS to business-critical monitors and to certain hours, and repeat reminders keep nudging until someone acknowledges the problem.

If an outside developer or agency maintains your site, add them as an email recipient or, on Starter, give them one of the two login seats. See alerts and notifications for every option.

Show customers you are on it with a status page

A status page gives your customers one place to check whether your online services are working, which reduces calls and messages during an outage. Every Uptime Tracker plan includes at least one.

For a small business, a status page is useful when customers rely on something online: an appointment booking system, an online ordering page, a customer portal or a members area. Link it from your contact page and email signature.

When something goes wrong, post a short update such as "Online booking is unavailable. Please call us to book while we fix it." Subscribers receive it by email. When the problem is fixed, post a final update and the page shows everything working again.

On Free the page lives at uptimetracker.live/status/your-business. On Starter it can be on your own address, such as status.yourbusiness.com, with HTTPS set up automatically. See status pages for details. Your status page stays online even when your own website is down, because it is hosted separately.

Get started in ten minutes

1. Sign in with your email address. You receive a link or code; there is no password to remember.
2. Name your workspace after your business and choose your time zone.
3. Add your homepage, with your business name as the keyword.
4. Add your booking, contact or ordering page the same way.
5. If you use email on your domain, add a DNS check for your MX record. That is a third monitor, so it needs Starter, which includes 10.
6. Check that alert emails arrive, and add your web developer's address if you have one.
7. Optionally, create a status page and link it from your website.

Once a week or month, glance at the dashboard. On Starter you can instead receive a scheduled weekly or monthly email report with your uptime, which is a simple way to check that your hosting provider is delivering what you pay for. If your uptime regularly falls short, the report gives you concrete numbers to bring to your hosting provider or to justify a move.

Which plan fits a small business?

Start on Free; move to Starter when you want more than two monitors, text-message alerts, domain-expiry warnings or a status page on your own domain.

As a rule of thumb, Free fits a business whose website is mainly a brochure, where watching the homepage and one key page with email alerts is enough. Starter fits a business that takes bookings or orders online, where an hour of downtime means lost revenue, and where someone should get a text message when the site breaks. Team is rarely needed for a single small business unless several staff share on-call duties.

Starter is $90 per year when billed annually. Prices exclude tax. See the full pricing page.