Website Monitoring
Know the moment your website goes down.
Website monitoring is the practice of continuously checking whether a website is reachable, responding correctly, and performing within acceptable limits — then alerting the right people immediately when it isn't. NetTests automates this process across all your domains, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Why website monitoring matters
Every minute a website is unavailable costs money. For an ecommerce business, an outage during peak traffic means lost transactions. For a SaaS company, downtime means support escalations, churn risk, and SLA credits. For an agency, it means an angry client call that could have been avoided entirely.
The problem isn't that outages happen — they do, on every platform, for every customer, regardless of hosting provider. The problem is how long it takes to discover them. Without monitoring, most outages are reported by customers, which means the site has already been down for minutes or hours before anyone internal knows.
Website monitoring closes that gap. Instead of waiting for a customer to call, you receive an alert within seconds of the failure being detected. You can investigate, escalate, and resolve the issue before the majority of your users ever encounter it.
Beyond uptime, website monitoring provides a historical record of availability. That record is invaluable when reviewing hosting reliability, negotiating SLAs, demonstrating uptime to clients, or diagnosing intermittent issues that only appear under specific conditions.
How NetTests website monitoring works
NetTests sends HTTP requests to your configured URLs at regular intervals — every minute, every five minutes, or on a custom schedule you define. Each request records the HTTP status code, response time, and the presence of any expected content. The results are stored, compared against the previous check, and if a failure condition is met, an alert is dispatched immediately.
A "failure" is configurable. By default, any non-200 status code or a response that exceeds your configured timeout triggers an alert. You can also configure content validation — for example, checking that a specific keyword or element is present in the response body — which detects issues like blank pages, error overlays, or cached content that looks like a successful response but isn't.
NetTests retains every check result, making it straightforward to answer questions like: "How many times did this site go down last month?" or "Was it reachable at 3:15 AM on the 14th?" Historical data transforms monitoring from a reactive alarm system into an operational intelligence tool.
Alert sensitivity is configurable per monitor. Require two or three consecutive failures before an alert fires to filter out transient network blips, or alert on the very first failed check for sites where every second of downtime matters. Time to first alert is typically under a minute from the moment a failure is confirmed — once a check fails and clears any consecutive-failure threshold you've set, the notification goes out immediately, with no batching and no artificial delay.
Add your URL, set your check interval, and define what a successful response looks like.
NetTests checks your site continuously and stores every result with a timestamp.
When something fails, your team is notified immediately — before customers notice.
Key features
HTTP status monitoring
Check for 200 OK, detect 404s, 500s, and unexpected redirects on every check cycle.
Response time tracking
Measure latency on every request and alert when response times exceed your defined threshold.
Content validation
Confirm that expected keywords or page elements are present — catch blank pages and error overlays.
Configurable intervals
Check as frequently as every minute or as infrequently as once per hour, depending on your needs.
Historical reporting
Every check result is stored so you can review uptime history, identify patterns, and demonstrate reliability.
Instant alerting
Receive email or webhook notifications the moment a check fails — not minutes later after multiple missed checks.
Multi-site management
Monitor dozens of websites from a single dashboard — ideal for agencies, MSPs, and DevOps teams.
SSL expiry awareness
Website monitoring integrates with certificate monitoring to surface SSL warnings alongside availability checks.
What you'll see
A live look at a multi-region check and the response-time history behind it.
Not ready to commit?
Try the free HTTP Load Test first. Run a one-time check with no account required, then set up continuous monitoring when you're ready.
Try the free tool →Free diagnostic tools
Run these one-off diagnostics now — or turn them into scheduled monitors.
Send ICMP echo requests to verify reachability and measure round-trip latency.
Fetch a URL and report HTTP status, response headers, and load time.
Check whether a list of hosts are serving HTTP or HTTPS on standard ports.
Build and send custom HTTP requests, inspect headers, and validate responses.
Frequently asked questions
What is website monitoring?
Website monitoring is an automated process that regularly checks whether a website is available, responding correctly, and performing within acceptable limits. Monitoring systems send HTTP requests to your URLs at intervals you define, record the results, and alert you when a check fails — giving you the earliest possible warning of an outage or degradation.
How often should I check my website?
For most production websites, a one-minute check interval provides a good balance between fast detection and resource usage. High-traffic ecommerce sites or critical SaaS applications often benefit from even more frequent checks. Low-priority or staging environments can be checked every five to fifteen minutes. The right interval depends on how quickly you need to know about failures and what your SLA obligations are.
What HTTP status codes indicate a failure?
By default, any status code outside the 2xx range — including 301/302 redirects that resolve to error pages, 4xx client errors, and 5xx server errors — can be treated as a failure condition. Content validation adds another layer: even a 200 OK response can be flagged as a failure if the expected keyword or element is absent from the body.
What is the difference between uptime monitoring and website monitoring?
Uptime monitoring typically refers to checking whether a server or IP address is reachable via ICMP ping. Website monitoring is more comprehensive: it operates at the HTTP layer, verifying that your web application is not just reachable but actually serving valid responses. A server can be "up" (responding to ping) while the web application is returning 503 errors — website monitoring catches that; uptime monitoring alone does not.
How do I get alerted when my website goes down?
NetTests sends notifications via email when a check fails. Webhook support allows integrations with Slack, PagerDuty, and other incident management tools. Alerts are sent immediately on the first confirmed failure — without artificial delays — so your team can begin investigating as quickly as possible.
Can I monitor websites that require authentication?
Yes. NetTests supports custom HTTP headers on monitoring requests, which allows you to pass Bearer tokens, API keys, or session cookies. For more complex authentication flows that require a full browser session, synthetic monitoring is the appropriate product.
How does website monitoring integrate with SSL monitoring?
NetTests combines website and SSL monitoring automatically on HTTPS endpoints. Each check captures the certificate's expiration date and chain validity alongside the HTTP status. You receive advance warnings when a certificate is approaching expiry, so a missed renewal never becomes an unexpected outage.
What is the difference between a false positive and a real outage?
A false positive occurs when a check fails due to a transient network condition — a temporary DNS resolution failure or a brief routing issue — rather than a genuine application problem. NetTests reduces false positives by confirming failures across multiple consecutive checks before dispatching an alert, and by allowing you to configure maintenance windows during planned downtime.
Start monitoring your website today
Set up your first website monitor in under two minutes. NetTests checks your site on a schedule, stores every result, and alerts your team the moment something breaks.
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