Question 1

How to monitor website uptime?

Accepted Answer

Website uptime monitoring uses automated checks that ping your website at regular intervals to verify it's accessible. A reliable monitoring service should check from multiple regions worldwide to detect both global outages and regional issues. Look for features like instant alerts via email or webhook, historical uptime reports, and status pages you can share with users. Most businesses aim for 99.9% uptime, which allows for only about 8.7 hours of downtime per year.

Question 2

How to monitor website availability?

Accepted Answer

Website availability monitoring goes beyond simple uptime checks by verifying that your site responds correctly, not just that it's reachable. This includes checking HTTP status codes (200 for success), SSL certificate validity, and response content. Set up monitors for critical endpoints like your homepage, API routes, and checkout pages. Multi-region monitoring ensures your site is available to users regardless of their location, helping identify CDN or DNS issues that might affect specific regions.

Question 3

How to monitor website performance?

Accepted Answer

Website performance monitoring involves tracking key metrics like response time, Time to First Byte (TTFB), and page load speed. Use a monitoring service that checks your site from multiple geographic locations to identify regional slowdowns. Set up alerts for when response times exceed acceptable thresholds, typically 200-500ms for APIs and 2-3 seconds for web pages. Regular performance monitoring helps you detect issues before they impact user experience and search rankings.

Question 4

How to check DNS uptime?

Accepted Answer

DNS uptime monitoring verifies that your domain's DNS records resolve correctly and quickly. DNS failures can make your entire website unreachable even if your servers are running fine. Monitor your DNS by performing regular resolution checks from multiple locations and tracking resolution times. Healthy DNS resolution should complete in under 100ms. Set up alerts for DNS propagation issues or when your nameservers become unresponsive.

Question 5

How to check DNS speed?

Accepted Answer

DNS speed affects how quickly users can connect to your website. To check DNS speed, measure the time it takes for DNS servers to resolve your domain name to an IP address. Fast DNS typically resolves in 20-50ms, while slow DNS can take 200ms or more, adding noticeable delay to every page load. Use DNS monitoring tools that test resolution time from multiple geographic locations. Consider using a premium DNS provider or CDN with global DNS infrastructure to improve resolution speed worldwide.

Question 6

What is a good website response time?

Accepted Answer

A good website response time is under 200ms for server response (TTFB) and under 2-3 seconds for full page load. For APIs, aim for under 100ms. Response times above 500ms can negatively impact user experience and SEO rankings. Factors affecting response time include server location, database queries, network latency, and CDN configuration. Monitor response times from multiple regions to ensure consistent performance for users worldwide.

Question 7

What is TTFB and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures how long it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of data from your server after making a request. It includes DNS lookup, TCP connection, SSL handshake, and server processing time. A good TTFB is under 200ms. High TTFB indicates server-side issues like slow database queries, insufficient server resources, or poor hosting. Google uses TTFB as a Core Web Vitals metric affecting search rankings.

Question 8

How to monitor SSL certificate expiration?

Accepted Answer

SSL certificate monitoring automatically tracks when your certificates expire and alerts you before they do. Expired SSL certificates cause browser security warnings that drive visitors away and can break your entire site. Set up monitoring to alert you at least 30 days before expiration. Good SSL monitoring also verifies certificate chain validity, checks for weak encryption, and ensures certificates are properly installed across all servers.

Question 9

What happens when SSL certificate expires?

Accepted Answer

When an SSL certificate expires, browsers display security warnings like "Your connection is not private" that prevent most users from accessing your site. This can cause immediate traffic drops, lost revenue, and damaged trust. Search engines may also temporarily de-index pages served over expired SSL. To prevent this, monitor certificate expiration dates and set up automated renewal with services like Let's Encrypt, or use monitoring alerts to renew manually before expiration.

Question 10

Why monitor from multiple regions?

Accepted Answer

Monitoring from multiple regions helps detect issues that only affect users in specific locations. A server might be reachable from one region but down in another due to network routing issues, CDN problems, or regional DNS failures. Multi-region monitoring also measures actual latency your users experience based on their geographic location. This is especially important for global businesses where users connect from different continents.

Question 11

What is synthetic monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Synthetic monitoring uses automated scripts to simulate user interactions with your website or API at regular intervals. Unlike real user monitoring (RUM), synthetic monitoring runs 24/7 regardless of actual traffic, making it ideal for detecting issues before users encounter them. It provides consistent baselines for performance comparison and can test from multiple geographic locations. Synthetic checks can verify uptime, response times, SSL certificates, and specific functionality.

Question 12

What is TCP monitoring?

Accepted Answer

TCP monitoring verifies that a server is accepting connections on a specific port. Unlike HTTP monitoring that checks web pages, TCP monitoring tests raw network connectivity to services like databases, mail servers, game servers, or custom applications. It measures connection time and verifies the port is open and responsive. TCP monitoring is essential for infrastructure that doesn't use HTTP, such as MySQL (port 3306), Redis (port 6379), or SMTP (port 25).

Question 13

How to monitor API endpoints?

Accepted Answer

API endpoint monitoring involves sending requests to your API at regular intervals and verifying correct responses. Monitor key metrics including response time, HTTP status codes, and response body content. Set up checks for critical endpoints like authentication, data retrieval, and payment processing. Use monitors from multiple regions to ensure API performance for all users. Configure alerts for error rates above acceptable thresholds, typically 0.1-1% depending on your SLA requirements.

Question 14

What is a status page?

Accepted Answer

A status page is a public webpage that displays the current operational status of your services. It shows which systems are operational, degraded, or experiencing outages, along with historical uptime data. Status pages build trust with users by providing transparency during incidents. They reduce support tickets by giving users a self-service way to check if issues are on your end. Most status pages also offer subscription options so users can receive notifications about outages.

Question 15

What is considered good uptime?

Accepted Answer

Good uptime is typically measured in "nines" - 99.9% uptime (three nines) allows about 8.7 hours of downtime per year, while 99.99% (four nines) allows only 52 minutes. Most SLAs guarantee 99.9% or 99.95% uptime. The right target depends on your business: e-commerce sites losing revenue during downtime need higher uptime than informational blogs. Remember that uptime is measured across all regions - your site being down in one region while up in others still counts against your uptime percentage.

Question 16

Why is my website slow?

Accepted Answer

Website slowness can stem from multiple causes: slow server response due to heavy database queries or insufficient resources, unoptimized images and assets, too many HTTP requests, lack of caching, slow DNS resolution, or distance from users without a CDN. Use monitoring to identify which metric is slow - DNS lookup, TCP connection, SSL handshake, TTFB, or content transfer. Regional monitoring helps determine if slowness affects all users or only specific locations.

Question 17

How to reduce website latency?

Accepted Answer

Reduce website latency by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve content from locations near your users, optimizing DNS with a fast provider, enabling HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, implementing browser caching, compressing responses with gzip or Brotli, and minimizing redirects. Server-side improvements include database query optimization, using faster hosting, and implementing application-level caching. Monitor latency from multiple regions to verify improvements benefit all users.

Frequently Asked Questions

Uptime Monitoring

Performance & Latency

SSL & Security

Global Monitoring

Infrastructure

Status Pages

Troubleshooting