Guides & Tutorials
Practical guides to website monitoring.
Learn how to monitor website availability, understand common reliability problems, and keep important websites in view. Explore step-by-step tutorials and clear technical explanations.
Explore Guides Explore Glossary
- CheckThe address is requested on a schedule.
- ConfirmA failure is checked again before it counts as an incident.
- AlertThe people you chose are told.
- ReviewEvery result stays in the history.
Start here
Complete Guide to Website Uptime Monitoring
Understand how uptime monitoring works, what it detects, and how to build a practical monitoring approach for your websites.
All guides
20 guides
-
Uptime Monitoring
Complete Guide to Website Uptime Monitoring
Understand how uptime monitoring works, what it detects, and how to build a practical monitoring approach for your websites. Updated -
Website Availability
How to Monitor Website Availability
A practical walkthrough: choose the address, set the interval, decide who is told, and read the results with confidence. Updated -
SSL & Certificates
How to Prevent SSL Certificate Expiration
How certificate expiry works, how to check the dates yourself, how to make renewal dependable, and how to be warned before it fails. Updated -
DNS & Domains
How to Check When a Domain Expires
Where the expiration date comes from, how to read it yourself, why it is sometimes not published, and how to be warned in time. Updated -
DNS & Domains
How to Troubleshoot DNS Resolution Errors
Read what a DNS failure is telling you, test it with dig and nslookup, and narrow it down to your zone, the delegation, a resolver, or your own machine. Updated -
Website Availability
Common Causes of Website Downtime
Start from the symptom, not the guess: what each failure looks like, what usually causes it, and the first check to run. Updated -
Website Availability
How to Investigate an HTTP 503 Error
A 503 means the server is answering but cannot handle the request right now. How to find out why, in what order to check, and what a monitor can tell you. Updated -
DNS & Domains
What Happens When a Domain Expires?
The stages a domain passes through after its registration ends, what breaks at each one, and what to do if it has already happened. Updated -
Incident Management
Why Uptime Monitors Send False Alerts
The common reasons for a false alarm, how confirmation by repeated checks works, and what to tune so alerts stay rare and believable. Updated -
Website Availability
Why Your Monitor Shows 403 but the Site Works
A monitor reports HTTP 403 while the page opens fine for you. Almost always something in front of the site is blocking the monitor. How to confirm it and fix it safely. Updated -
SSL & Certificates
Why an SSL Certificate Expires Despite Auto-Renewal
Automatic renewal is a chain of steps, and any of them can fail without a sound. Where the chain breaks, how to find the broken link, and how to be told before visitors are. Updated -
Using UptimeWire
Your First Website in 5 Minutes
Create a free account, confirm your email, add one website, understand what its status says, and check that an alert reaches you. Updated -
Using UptimeWire
Connect Notification Channels
Where to set up each alert channel in your account, what to paste, how to send a test message, and what to do when an alert does not arrive. Updated -
Using UptimeWire
How to Read an Incident
What opens and closes an incident, why the alert is not instant, what the incident page shows, and how planned work holds alerts back. Updated -
Using UptimeWire
What to Do About a False Alarm
A practical checklist for an alert about a website that was working: find the reason, fix the cause, and use the settings you have. Updated -
Using UptimeWire
Status Page and Your Own Domain
Create a status page, choose the websites on it, and on Business and Agency plans show it under your own domain with two DNS records. Updated -
Using UptimeWire
Common Questions
Common questions grouped by topic, each with a short answer and a link to the full answer. Updated -
Using UptimeWire
Contact Support
Where to write, and what to include so support can understand your problem from the first message. Updated -
Website Availability
How to Monitor a WordPress Website
A WordPress site rarely fails in one clean way. A white screen, a database error, or a stuck maintenance notice each look different from outside. Which addresses to watch, and which signals catch each failure. Updated -
Using UptimeWire
How to Let UptimeWire Checks Through Your Firewall
Many sites sit behind Cloudflare, a security plugin or a hosting firewall that turns robots away. Allow the addresses our checks come from, and only them, and the monitor sees your site again. Updated
Learn the terms.
Short definitions of the words the guides use.
-
API
An API, short for Application Programming Interface, is a set of agreed rules that lets one program ask another program for data or for an action, without knowing how the other program works inside. -
DNS Resolution
DNS resolution is the lookup that turns a domain name such as example.com into the IP addresses a browser connects to. -
Downtime
Downtime is a period during which a website or service is unavailable or not working as it should for the people who use it. -
HTTP Status Codes
HTTP status codes are three-digit numbers that a web server sends with every response to say whether a request succeeded, needs further action, or failed, and on whose side. -
Incident
An incident is a confirmed period of trouble: it starts when a problem has been verified and ends when the service has recovered. -
Maintenance window
A maintenance window is a period announced in advance during which planned work, such as a deployment or migration, may make a service unavailable. -
MCP
MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets an AI assistant connect to outside tools and data in one agreed way, so that the assistant can look things up in a service instead of guessing. -
Response Time
Response time is the time between sending a request to a website and receiving its answer, measured in milliseconds. -
SLA
A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a provider and a customer that states the level of service the provider commits to, how it is measured, and what follows if it is not met. -
SSL Certificate
An SSL/TLS certificate is a digital document that ties a website's name to a public key, so browsers can confirm who they are talking to and encrypt the connection. -
Uptime
Uptime is the share of a chosen period during which a website or service is available, usually written as a percentage.
Keep exploring.
UptimeWire checks the websites you add for uptime, SSL certificates, domain expiration, and DNS.