Frequently asked questions on website monitoring

Good question. Use StatusCake’s website monitoring solution! The best part? All we’d need to monitor your website is the URL if it’s a website, or the IP address if it’s a server you would like to monitor via PING.

All of our website monitoring is done remotely and load wise it’s no heavier than a single visit from a normal user to your website. So there’s no risk in running the performance testing.

Website downtime is when your website goes down and people can’t access it. Downtime isn’t binary which means your website could be up in the UK but down in Canada and you wouldn’t know about it.

It’s also not always as simple as 404 not found, there might be situations where a far flung component lets you down, and as a result customers can’t process orders on your ecommerce website, or visitors can’t read the latest article on your blog.

StatusCake’s uptime monitoring solution alerts you to website downtime in 43 locations in 30 different countries so you’re always the first to know. 

The most common error codes for website downtime are:

404 – page not found

401 – Unauthorized

500 – Internal server error

502 – Bad Gateway

410 – Gone

A website uptime test is carried out to see if your website is available for browsing in a set of locations, or globally.

For example, if you have a big customer base in India but are based in the UK, you can set an uptime test to check both locations so you know when and where your website has gone down. Each uptime test will periodically check one URL or IP address.

One test is one URL, IP or website address which can be added for periodic error checking. Each test can have a custom check rate depending on your StatusCake plan level, ranging from once per 30 seconds to once per week.

We advise using the fastest check rate you can to produce the most detailed coverage, and also to return the most accurate downtime length in the event of a detection.

When your website is down we can alert you right away via your chosen alert method (email, SMS, mobile push & web hook), we will also record the downtime along with all of the information within a dedicated detailed page in app.

Having server monitoring in place as well as uptime monitoring allows you to see when your websites and services might start having problems, often before they do. We can use server monitoring to detect a variety of issues related to resource usage.

We can monitor the server’s health with our server monitoring feature. This is useful for getting early indications of downtime, and we can let you know if resource usage is persistently above set thresholds on RAM, DISK and CPU.

Confirmation servers are used at StatusCake to ensure that all alerts are valid, when we detect a downtime initially we can optionally confirm that downtime with up to 10 additional and separate servers – this means no false alarms.

We test page speed by using dedicated server locations across the world. We analyse and report on response times of how quickly your website loads – simulating a visit from a real user. We generate a detailed report showing a breakdown for the load time and performance of each resource on the page, and then we send this report to our customers.

We measure page load speed on your website by visiting the webpage with a real browser and calculating the total load time, looking at each individual resource provided by the server.

Page speed is important for many aspects of your business. From SEO and rankings in Google (if your page speed is slow, you will be ranked lower), to customer retention and satisfaction, bounce rates and conversions to overall revenue, page speed can be detrimental to all of these making it a hugely important element on your website to monitor. 

SSL monitoring works by StatusCake visiting your website and checking the expiration date as well as the validity of the SSL certificate that’s in use.

Having an SSL certificate on your website communicates to the user that their data is safe and encrypted when browsing your website.

A domain can be stolen and this is generally referred to as hijacking. With our domain monitoring it’s easy to see whether the transfer lock on a domain has been removed, and we can let you know if any of your DNS records undergo unexpected changes right away.

We can do this with our Content Match feature, this checks the page source for your chosen string/strings and can report to you based on whether they are found/not found.