Uptime monitoring
Know straight away when your site goes down, so you can fix it before your visitors even notice.
Overview
DomainDash checks your website regularly from real servers around the world and lets you know if something goes wrong. Whether your site is completely unreachable or running slowly, you'll get a clear picture of what's happening and when it started.
How uptime checks work
Every few minutes, DomainDash sends a request to your site, just like a real visitor would. We look at three things:
- Did your site respond? If we can't reach it at all, we mark it as Down.
- Did it respond correctly? We check that the HTTP status code matches what you expect (usually
200 OK). If something else comes back, we flag it. - How quickly did it respond? We measure the full response time in milliseconds and track it over time so you can spot trends.
Based on these checks, your site gets one of three statuses:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Healthy | Your site is responding normally and loading quickly |
| Slow | Your site is responding, but it's taking longer than usual |
| Down | Your site isn't responding or is returning an unexpected error |
The check frequency is configurable, anywhere from every minute to every 15 minutes. More frequent checks catch problems faster, but less frequent checks are perfectly fine for sites that don't change often. Adjust this in your site settings.
Understanding your uptime data
When you open a site, you'll see a few key pieces of information at the top:
- Uptime percentage: the proportion of checks that came back healthy in your selected timeframe. Anything above 99.5% shows in green.
- Average response time: how long your site typically takes to respond, in milliseconds. Under 300ms is great, under 800ms is OK, and anything above that is flagged as slow.
- Total checks: how many individual checks we've run in the current timeframe.
Below these stats, a response time chart shows how your site's response speed has changed over time. Each point on the chart represents a check. Switch between different timeframes, from the last hour right up to a full year, using the buttons at the top of the page.
The check history
Scroll down to see every individual check we've run, most recent first. Each row shows:
- The HTTP status code (like
HTTP 200) - The response time in milliseconds
- Which region the check ran from
- When it happened
For the most recent check, you'll also see a timing breakdown that shows how long each phase of the connection took: DNS lookup, connecting to the server, waiting for a response, and downloading the page. This is handy for understanding where the slowness is if your site isn't performing well.
How long do we keep check history?
Your plan determines how long detailed check history is retained. Upgrade your plan for longer history.
What to do when your site is slow
If DomainDash shows your site as Slow, here are a few things worth checking:
- Is it slow from everywhere, or one region? If you've enabled regional checks, compare the response times. If it's only slow from one location, the issue might be distance from your server rather than a problem with your site itself.
- Check your hosting provider. Sometimes slowness is caused by your server being overloaded, running out of memory, or having a noisy neighbour on shared hosting.
- Look at the timing breakdown. If the DNS lookup (the step that translates your domain name into a server address) is slow, your DNS provider might be the bottleneck. If "waiting" is slow, your server is taking a long time to process the request.
- Check for recent changes. Did you deploy new code, update a plugin, or change your hosting? Sometimes slowdowns start right after a change.
If your site goes Down, DomainDash opens an incident automatically and sends you a notification. See How incidents work for more on that.
Related
- SSL certificates for monitoring your site's security certificate
- Regional checks for comparing performance from different parts of the world
- How incidents work for what happens when your site goes down