Many website owners are under the mistaken impression that their website never goes down as long as the following things are true…
- Every time they visit the site it's up and running.
- They haven't gotten any complaints from users about website outages.
- No word from the web host about any outages at the data center.
These are not reliable metrics to determine your actual website uptime. Your website could be going down at a time when nobody is visiting it, so you aren't aware. Another possibility is that the web host may have solved the outage quick enough to meet the claimed metric of uptime they advertise. This often causes them to feel no obligation to report the outage. To be fair, if the actual uptime meets or exceeds the advertised uptime, the are techically not required to inform their clients.
It's a really good idea to make sure you can track if and when any outages occur, and how long they last. This is key because if your website goes down too often and for too long, it can be highly problematic.
You never know when a new visitor will come across your site. If it's down, there goes your good first impression. Not to mention the impact with search engines. If Google or another search engine just so happens to attempt to crawl your site for indexing at a time when it's down, the crawl and index attempt will fail. That event will make it into the search engine algorithm for your domain and can seriously hurt your ranking. It makes sense too. Why would Google, or any other search engine for that matter, send traffic to an unreliable website? They simply wouldn't.
At this point I just want to make it clear that I'm not trying to sound like an alarmist. Most large hosting providers, especially massive cloud providers like Amazon & Google, meet and often exceed their advertised uptimes. However, outages absolutely do occur. Data-centers that host websites and cloud computing don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes power goes out, storms occur, hardware fails, which can trigger fail-overs. Things can and often do happen that nobody can control. Even with backup generators and advanced infrastructure, things can still occasionally go wrong.
This is what you need to be prepared for. There's several things you can do to know the state of your websites uptime without having to manually monitor it yourself.
The least expensive thing you can do is use Google Analytics. If your website has been around for a while and gets a high level of consistent traffic, you can use this to help determine your website's availability. For instance: if your site gets a certain amount of traffic, at a certain time every single day, then on one day it shows no traffic at all when there should be some, your website may have experienced an outage during that time.
Keep in mind this method is extremely limited. Just because there's a drop off in traffic doesn't mean you had an outage. If you have a constant flow of traffic that's consistent on a daily basis, then it's more likely, but still not for sure.
This method can be effective, but the weakness of it is that it relies a bit to heavy on supposition. The best method is to get empirical proof of the state of your website at any given time. This is best accomplished with a monitoring service.
In the screenshot below you can see the month to date traffic for February 2023 of a live website we host and manage (we got permission to show this first of course). This website did not experience an outage, but I wanted to show you what to look for anyway. The traffic is broken down by day in this graph. This particular view may not show you exactly when an outage occured, but it can be a large indicator for further investigation. Notice the lowest valleys do not drop below 20 users per day for this website. This is typical for this website. If it were ever to drop below 20 or even to zero, that could be an indicator of an outage and I would then investigate.
The next screenshot shows the website traffic by the hour for one day. As you an see, there are several valleys that zero out. These were not outages!
The monitoring we have setup for this client shows the site was up all day with no issues. In fact, this traffic pattern is typical for this website. This is what I mean about the analyatics method having limits. Now, if you see a significant dip in both by the day and by the hour that doesn't match up with your typical traffic patterns, you might have had an outage.
There are many good monitoring tools out there that are affordable. Many even have free plans that actually fit small businesses with one website perfectly. I do recommend you get one of the paid plans though. This is because most free ones come with limitations that won't give you information that's as reliable as it could be. For instance, UptimeRobot has a free plan, but it only checks your uptime every 5 minutes. The paid plans do so every 60 seconds. If your website only goes down for a minute, then it could miss the outage. I recommend you lookup several and give at least one a try and see if it works for you. If you try several of the free ones, that will give you an idea of what you want to use before signing up for a paid plan.
You can set up several monitors with alarms that send alerts letting you know if something goes wrong. You can usually send to email and text so you get the alert when the event happens. Many will also let you set a quiet time if you don't want to get a text at 2:30 in the morning. You can always check your dashboard and view the uptime on a timeline.
One more thing you can do is check your server logs regularly. Usually you will find them in a folder that's named something like this: /var/log/messages
When you look in those files you might see error messages that indicate the connection was down or some other server errors. In some cases you may have to turn on a debugging mode to get the logs you need. This method is usually for systems administrators to troubleshoot what happened during an outage.
SUMMARY
Even if your host claims the typical 99.9% uptime that most do in fact have, it's important to track your uptime so you know if your website is having any problems that could affect your user experience.
The most effective methods are to use a monitoring service, keep an eye on your logs and use Google Analytics to see any user session drop offs. A good amount of website owners won't be able to make much use of the logs, but using the other two mentioned methods will have you covered.
If you had to use only one of the three, definitely use a monitoring service with a paid plan. This will give you the most granular look at how your website performs minute by minute.