Engineering · September 29, 2026
Website uptime monitoring: what a one-minute check tells you
Uptime monitoring is simple until it pages you at 3 a.m. for nothing. What to check, how to avoid false alarms, and how to read the numbers.
What an uptime check actually does
An uptime monitor requests a page on your site at a fixed interval and records two things: whether the response was successful and how long it took. Deeplitic checks each monitored site every minute, follows redirects, treats any 2xx or 3xx response as up, and treats errors, timeouts, and 4xx or 5xx responses as down.
That tells you whether the site is reachable from the outside, which is what your visitors care about. It does not tell you whether every feature works; for that you need application-level checks or tests.
Choose the right address
Monitor the page that matters most, usually the homepage or the main landing page, and make sure it is served the way visitors reach it (with HTTPS and without a login). If your homepage is cached at the edge, also consider monitoring a page that hits your application, such as a pricing page, so an origin failure is not hidden by the cache.
Avoid false alarms
Networks are noisy. A single failed request can be a blip in a data centre far from your users. Deeplitic only declares a site down after two consecutive failed checks, and only sends an email when the state changes: once when it goes down and once when it recovers.
Pause monitoring during planned maintenance so the incident history reflects real problems, not deploys.
Read the numbers
Uptime is reported for 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days. The difference between 99.9% and 99.99% sounds small, but over 30 days it is the difference between about 43 minutes and about 4 minutes of downtime.
Response time matters as much as uptime. A site that is technically up but takes several seconds to respond will lose visitors. Watch the response-time chart for gradual increases, which often point to a growing database, a missing cache, or a slow third-party script.
Connect downtime to traffic
Because uptime and analytics live in the same dashboard, you can check an incident against the traffic chart for the same hours to see how many visits it affected, and whether a campaign was running at the time.