It was January 2024, peak summer season in the Bay of Islands. For a regional tourism information site, that fortnight carries more bookings and enquiries than most of the rest of the year.
The site went offline. The host’s uptime check caught it and sent the alert to the web agency. The agency’s reply was short: “domain name has expired — the wrong email address for reminders was entered when the domain was transferred last year, and so the client didn’t know it was expiring.”
The registrar had been sending renewal notices to an address nobody with authority over the domain had read since the transfer. Nobody had set up a domain expiry alert. The first notice anyone acted on was the downtime alert, after the domain had already lapsed.
Nobody could say afterwards how long the site had been down before the alert, or which bookings went elsewhere in that window.
That site had a check running, so somebody found out. Many small-business sites have none. They rely on a visitor noticing the problem, bothering to report it, and finding a contact method that still works.
The Dollar-a-Month Problem
A small business with a website commonly spends $50 to 500amonthonhosting, developmenttime, pluginlicencesandtheadsthatsendpeopletothesite.KnowingwhetherthatsiteisupcostslessthanUS1 a month: in September 2026, UptimeRobot’s Solo plan was US$9 a month on annual billing for 50 monitors, and one site needs about five.
Three Orders of Finding Out
In my experience a broken site is found in one of three orders.
Customer first. An instrument maker selling into North America, Europe and Asia had intermittent 500 errors for weeks. By any uptime check the site was up, because the home page answered. Visitors on specific pages were getting errors while a global marketing push sent traffic to the site. A visitor reported it, and the report passed through two organisations before it reached someone who could fix it. Most visitors who hit an error leave without telling anyone, so each report stands for an unknown number who left.
Host first. Also in January 2024, the down alert for a professional services firm, a supplier to construction and agriculture, came to us, and we passed it to the agency that manages the site. The agency’s emails to the client bounced, because the firm’s email ran on the same domain. The domain had expired at another registrar, and management were all off with COVID. The agency phoned instead and got the domain renewed.
Client first, because a check was missing. In May 2024 a CDN certificate on one of that agency’s sites did not renew. The client emailed the agency in the evening, the agency emailed us the next morning, and it was fixed within the hour. We had never recorded that CDN for certificate renewal and had no check on it. In 2025 a www certificate on another site slipped past the same way.
What Actually Gets Missed
A basic uptime check asks one question: does the home page answer? Several common failures pass that test.
Domain expiry. Renewal reminders go to whatever address was entered at registration or at the last transfer. After a transfer that address may belong to the previous operator, or to nobody. Most monitoring tools can alert 30 to 60 days before expiry at no extra cost.
Certificate problems. An expired or misconfigured certificate puts a browser warning in front of the site. The same instrument maker later had a visitor report a certificate warning, and the report ran visitor to company, company to agency, agency to host, and each handoff depended on someone bothering to pass it on.
Errors on inner pages. A broken .htaccess can leave the home page answering while every other page returns an error. A check that only loads the home page reports that site as up.
Pages that answer and still show an error. A server can return a normal response code with an error message, a blank template or a broken form in the body. A keyword check looks for words that should be on the page and fails when they are missing.
Failures only logged-out visitors see. A solo email marketing consultant had forms stop loading and the layout break on the morning of a product launch, for logged-out visitors only. Logged in as admin, the site looked fine. She caught it because she opened the public URL in a private browser window before the campaign went out. A check that loads the page as an anonymous visitor sees what customers see. The WordPress dashboard does not.
What the Checks Cost to Skip
Take a service business, say a surveyor or an accountant, that gets ten website enquiries per business day, about one every 48 minutes during opening hours. A four-hour outage nobody notices loses about five enquiries. If one in five would have become a 2, 000job, thatisonejobgoneinasingleafternoon.MonitoringthatsitecostsaboutUS11 a year.
A restaurant taking 30 online bookings a day loses about a dozen covers to the same four hours. At $80 a head that is close to $1,000.
Nobody books these losses, because there is no record of the enquiries that never arrived. An outage on Tuesday afternoon that a customer mentions on Wednesday morning costs a Tuesday evening of bookings, and the accounts show nothing.
Ask Your Host What It Checks
Your host may already be checking your site. We check every site we host every minute, look for a keyword on the page, and load an inner page as well as the home page. The checks run around the clock; human response is generally 6am to 10pm NZT. Over the last year the median site we host was available 99.94% of the time, about five hours down.
In March 2024 an agency’s client asked it for uptime monitoring. Before signing up to a tool, the agency owner asked us what was already in place, and the answer was that it was covered by the hosting fee.
Host monitoring only helps if you know three things: which URLs are checked, what the check looks for on them, and who receives the alert. If the answer is “the home page, whether it responds, and an agency inbox”, most of the failures above will still reach you through a customer.
Where the Alert Goes
The professional services firm showed a routing problem: the agency’s first attempt to reach the client used email on the domain that had just expired.
Route alerts to the agency and to the business owner, because either inbox may go unread at 11pm on a Saturday or over Christmas, and use a channel that does not depend on the site’s own domain. A text message, or an address at another domain, still arrives when the domain has lapsed.
The Baseline
- Uptime, checked every one to five minutes, alerting both the owner and the agency.
- Domain expiry, alerting 30 to 60 days out, with a named person who can renew it.
- Certificate validity and expiry for every hostname the site uses, including www and any CDN hostname.
- A keyword on the page, so an error page served with a normal response still fails the check.
- At least one inner page, plus the key form or checkout page, loaded as a logged-out visitor.
That is five monitors per site. UptimeRobot’s Solo plan (US$9 a month on annual billing, September 2026) includes keyword, certificate and domain-expiry checks at one-minute intervals and covers ten sites at five monitors each. Its free plan is limited to hobby and non-profit projects. Adding five monitors for one site takes about ten minutes.
If your site has no uptime, domain and certificate checks, set them up this week, or ask your host which of them it already runs. If you would like us to review what is covered and what is not, we offer a free site audit at managedhosting.partners.
