Put a free uptime monitor on your site this week. It asks your homepage for a page every few minutes, and when the site stops answering, it emails your phone. That is the whole answer, and the setup takes about ten minutes.
What a monitor is actually doing
A monitor is a computer somewhere else that keeps asking your website for a page. UptimeRobot’s help center defines the monitoring interval as “the frequency at which UptimeRobot sends requests to your monitors.” Nothing cleverer than that is going on.
If a page comes back, your site is up. If the request times out, or the server hands back an error, the monitor counts that as down and sends the alert.
So the interval is the number that matters. On a five minute check, your site can sit dark for up to five minutes before anything reaches you. Across an eight hour day that works out to 96 checks. Divide 480 minutes by five on your phone and you get the same number.
UptimeRobot prints the same point on its own pricing page: “The shorter the interval, the faster you will spot the incident.”
The free plans are enough for one website
These are the published terms as of August 2026.
- UptimeRobot’s Plans and Pricing page lists a Free plan at $0 a month, with 50 monitors and a “5 min. monitoring interval.” The page describes it as “Good for hobby and non-profit projects. No credit card required!” That page carries no update date.
- Better Stack’s check frequency documentation says “The frequency options range from 3 minutes for free plans to 30 seconds for paid plans.” Its pricing page lists 10 monitors and heartbeats, one status page, and “Slack & e-mail alerts” at no cost. Neither page carries an update date.
One thing is worth knowing, since older comparison pages still say the opposite. UptimeRobot’s help center article on who should use the free plan, updated June 15, 2026, says “The free plan can be used for business, commercial, and revenue-generating projects.”
Now the honest part. You have one website. You need one monitor. Do not buy a paid monitoring plan for this.
Thirty second checks, the fastest either company sells, go to businesses running payment systems, where the gap between half a minute and five minutes costs real orders. A roofer who wants to know his site is down before Monday morning gets nearly all the value from the free tier.
Both companies can rewrite those pages tomorrow. Open them yourself before you sign up, and start on the free plan.
Send the alert somewhere you will actually see it
Free tiers alert by email. UptimeRobot lists text and voice call alerts as well, with the credits sold separately. Better Stack’s free plan lists Slack and email.
Email is fine, as long as it lands on the phone in your pocket and not in a web mail box you open on Fridays.
Two things are worth setting up while you are in there:
- Add a second person to the alert. Your office manager, your wife, whoever answers the phone at 7am.
- Turn on the recovery alert, so you also get told when the site came back.
An alert nobody reads is the same as no monitor at all. If the site dies at 6am Saturday and the email sits unopened until Monday, you learned nothing.
Noticing fast is worth more than it looks. Host uptime promises carry short claim windows, and the clock sometimes starts only when you file a support ticket, which is laid out in what a 99.9% uptime promise is really worth.
Google Search Console tells you, but late
Search Console is worth opening. It is not an alarm.
The Crawl Stats report carries a Host status section. Google’s help page says “Host status describes whether or not Google encountered availability issues when trying to crawl your site.” Three things get graded: robots.txt availability, DNS resolution, and host connectivity.
Google even prints a threshold you can check against your own chart. Each category has a dotted red line, and the example given on the page is “if DNS resolution fails for more than 5% of requests on a given day.”
Read the three status bands slowly, since that is where the limit shows.
- Green means Google “didn’t encounter any significant crawl availability issues on your site in the past 90 days.”
- The middle band means at least one significant issue in the last 90 days, “but it occurred more than a week ago.”
- Red means “at least one significant crawl availability issue in the last week on your site.”
“In the last week” is the sharpest reading this report gives you. That is the honest limit of the evidence. It can tell you something broke in the last seven days. It cannot tell you the site is down right now, and that help page carries no update date.
Use it once a month to catch outages your monitor slept through. Do not use it as the alarm.
Why you want to hear about it fast
Google’s page on how HTTP status codes affect its crawlers, last updated February 4, 2026, is plain about server errors. “5xx and 429 server errors prompt Google’s crawlers to temporarily slow down with crawling.” Then: “For Google Search, already indexed URLs are preserved in the index, but eventually dropped.” Further down the same page: “Google’s indexing pipeline removes from the index URLs that persistently return a server error.”
Notice what is missing. No count of days. Google does not print a deadline on that page, so anybody quoting you an exact one is guessing. What the document supports is narrow and useful: a short outage slows the crawling, and a long one costs you listings.
Winning listings back, and getting named in AI answers, is slower work than staying up. It is a separate job from hosting, and it is what search checks are for.
What to do next
- Open UptimeRobot or Better Stack and make a free account.
- Add one monitor pointed at your homepage, using the full address with https at the front.
- Put two email addresses on it. Yours, and one other person’s.
- Add a keyword check, which UptimeRobot’s help center lists among the free plan’s monitor types, so the monitor looks for a word that ought to be on the page. A half broken site, or one gone blank after an update, can still answer with a perfectly happy page.
- Write down who to call when it fires: your host, your developer, your domain registrar. Put those three numbers in your phone now, not at 6am on a Saturday.
- Set a monthly reminder to open Crawl Stats in Search Console.
A monitor tells you. It does not fix anything, and it does not shorten the outage by a second. Trouble that is not an outage at all needs a different look, like a page that loads fine and still shows a browser warning, which is its own repair.
There is less machinery to fall over on a site that is a folder of finished files, which is how the website build here works. That is not zero. Every site on earth still leans on a name server and a host, and yours will go dark one day too. The only thing you really control is how fast you hear about it.