Uptime check: how to check website uptime, explained, with a free test

What is an uptime check?

An uptime check requests your website from the outside at a fixed interval and records whether it answers: with which HTTP status code, how fast and with what content. If the page does not answer, or answers with an error, an alert goes out. Many such checks add up to your uptime, the share of time the site was reachable, usually given as a percentage per month.

Uptime monitoring explained: what happens during a check

A probe sends a request to your URL every few minutes. It checks the status code, the response time, the TLS certificate and, if you want, a piece of text that must appear on the page. When a check fails, it is worth running it once more before the alert goes to email or your team channel: a single network blip should not wake anyone up. Every check is kept in the history, which gives you the uptime rate, downtime periods and response time charts.

Testing uptime: what 99.9% really means

99.9% uptime sounds close to perfect, yet it allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month. At 99%, it is more than 7 hours. How you measure matters just as much: a check every ten minutes can miss a five-minute outage entirely. And an uptime figure says nothing about whether visitors can actually get anything done on the site.

Where an uptime check stops

A page can return 200 OK while the cart stays empty, the login form hangs or the pay button has vanished after an update. The uptime check stays green. That is why Pathly adds Flow to Ping: a real Chrome replays a visitor’s journey and saves a screenshot of the step that breaks. Chain checks the API calls behind it, such as a login followed by a protected route.

Check your website uptime for free

The free audit requests your page once from Europe and shows response time, TLS certificate, broken links and security headers, with no account, in about 30 seconds. For ongoing monitoring, you then create a Ping on the free Solo plan, no credit card needed.

Uptime check: frequently asked questions

How do I monitor a website’s availability?

With an ongoing uptime check: a service requests the site from the outside at a fixed interval and alerts you as soon as it stops answering. That is how you measure availability at night and at weekends, even with no visitors. In Pathly this is a Ping, included in the free Solo plan with no credit card.

Is an uptime check the same as an uptime test or an uptime checker?

Mostly, yes. All three describe checking whether a website is reachable from the outside. A one-off test or checker shows the state right now. Ongoing uptime monitoring repeats the check at a fixed interval and alerts you when the site goes down.

How often should uptime be checked?

Every one to five minutes for a business website. The longer the gap, the longer an outage can go unnoticed. In Pathly the shortest interval depends on the plan, and the pricing page lists it for each one.

Can I check my website’s uptime for free?

Yes. The audit checks your page once, without an account. For ongoing checks there is the free Solo plan, with no credit card, which includes Ping checks and one Flow every 24 hours.

Is an uptime check enough for an online store?

As a foundation, yes. As your only safeguard, no. It tells you when the server stops answering. But a broken checkout, a stuck login or a failing form often still return 200 OK. That is what Flow is for: it replays the journey in a real browser.

Where are Pathly’s probes located?

In Europe, on Google Cloud in the europe-west1 region. Pathly applies the GDPR, and a data processing agreement (DPA) is available to its customers.

Further reading

• Ping: HTTP and uptime checks
• Flow: journeys in a real browser
• Chain: checking API chains
• Synthetic monitoring explained
• Uptime vs user journey monitoring
• Pricing and check intervals