WatchUptime monitoring in practice: guides for the teams who keep things online
Articles for everyone responsible for websites, APIs, certificates and background jobs — written by people who know the pain of finding out about an outage too late.
Getting started
- Guide
What is uptime monitoring?
Published 15 May 2026A plain-English guide to uptime monitoring — what it is, how it works and why every team that runs a website or API needs it.
Read the article → - Guide
What is a good uptime percentage?
Published 19 May 2026“Three nines,” “four nines” — uptime targets sound abstract until you convert them to real downtime. Here's what each level actually allows, and how to pick one.
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SSL & certificates
- Guide
How to monitor SSL certificates before they expire
Published 22 May 2026Expired TLS certificates cause sudden, embarrassing outages. Here is how to catch them in good time.
Read the article → - Troubleshooting
SSL certificate expired? Here's how to fix it
Published 26 May 2026An expired TLS certificate makes browsers block your site with a scary security warning. The fix is usually quick — here's how.
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Cron & background jobs
- Guide
Heartbeat monitoring: how to catch silent cron job failures
Published 29 May 2026Cron jobs, backups and background workers fail silently — nothing requests them, so nothing notices when they stop. Heartbeat monitoring flips the logic around.
Read the article → - Troubleshooting
Cron job not running? How to debug it
Published 1 June 2026A cron job that silently stops is one of the hardest failures to notice. Here's how to work out why it didn't run — and how to be told next time.
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Operations & alerting
- Guide
Building an alerting strategy that beats alert fatigue
Published 3 June 2026Too few alerts and you miss outages; too many and your team stops reading them. A good alerting strategy is mostly about cutting noise so the real signals get through.
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Status page best practices
Published 5 June 2026A status page turns every outage from a flood of support tickets into self-service. Here is how to run one that customers actually trust.
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Troubleshooting
- Troubleshooting
Why is my website down?
Published 8 June 2026Your site won't load. Before you panic, here is how to tell whether it's really down, work out why, and get it back — in order.
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What is a 503 Service Unavailable error?
Published 10 June 2026A 503 means your server was reached but can't handle the request right now. Unlike a 404, the page exists — the server just isn't ready. Here's what causes it and how to fix it.
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Choosing & compliance
- Buyer's guide
How to choose an uptime monitoring tool
Published 11 June 2026Most monitoring tools look alike on the pricing page. The differences that matter show up later — in how they alert, where they store data and what the “free” plan really covers.
Read the article → - Guide
GDPR and uptime monitoring: what to check before you choose a tool
Published 12 June 2026Monitoring looks harmless — it just pings your site. But it logs IP addresses, runs on someone else's servers and may sit outside the EU. Here is what GDPR asks of you.
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Why we write this
Too many teams discover uptime and certificate problems the hard way — from an angry customer, or an expiry date no one was watching. We write these guides so you can catch them first.
What's the next step?
Add your first monitor in minutes — or see what WatchControl can do.