Website Status Checker Check Your Site Now, Monitor It 24/7
Check whether your website is up right now, from several locations at once. Then learn how website monitoring keeps checking it around the clock and alerts you the moment it goes down.
At a glance
- Free status check: sends a real HTTP or HTTPS request to your site from up to 3 locations and reports the status code, response time and any error.
- Down for everyone or just you: results from several locations show whether an outage is global, regional or local to your network.
- One-off vs. monitoring: a status check answers "is it up now?"; website monitoring repeats the check every few minutes and alerts you when it fails.
- 24/7 monitoring: Dotcom-Monitor, the company behind Dotcom-Tools, checks websites, web applications, APIs and servers as often as every minute from more than 30 locations.
How to check if a website is up
- Enter the website address in the box above and click Check status.
- The Web Server Test opens with your URL. Select up to three locations and run it.
- Read the result for each location:
- 2xx status (for example 200 OK): the site is up from that location.
- 3xx: a redirect; the test follows it and shows the final page.
- 4xx or 5xx, a timeout or a connection error: the site is down or broken from that location.
If every location fails, the site is down for everyone. If the test locations succeed but you can't open the site, the problem is on your side: your network, DNS cache, VPN or firewall.
What is website monitoring?
Website monitoring is the automated, repeated testing of a website from outside its own network to make sure it is available, fast and working correctly. A monitoring service requests your pages every few minutes from several locations, records the response time and the result, and sends an alert by email, SMS or phone when a check fails or gets too slow. It finds outages before your visitors report them, and it builds the uptime history you need to measure your service level.
Status check vs. website monitoring
| One-off status check | Website monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | Is my site up right now? | Is my site up all the time, and how fast? |
| How often | When you run it | Every 1 to 60 minutes, 24/7 |
| Alerts | No | Email, SMS, phone and integrations |
| History and uptime reports | No | Yes |
| Finds outages at night and on weekends | No | Yes |
| Cost | Free on Dotcom-Tools | Paid service, with a free trial |
What website monitoring checks
- Uptime: the page answers with a successful status code.
- Response time: how long the server and the full page take to load, compared with a threshold.
- Content: a keyword or element is present, so an error page that returns 200 OK is still caught.
- SSL certificates: the certificate is valid and not about to expire.
- Transactions: multi-step journeys such as login, search, add to cart and checkout, run in a real browser.
- APIs, DNS and servers: REST and SOAP endpoints, DNS records, mail, FTP and other servers.
What does 99.9% uptime mean?
| Uptime | Downtime per month | Downtime per year |
|---|---|---|
| 99% | about 7 hours 18 minutes | about 3.65 days |
| 99.9% | about 43.8 minutes | about 8.77 hours |
| 99.99% | about 4.4 minutes | about 52.6 minutes |
| 99.999% | about 26 seconds | about 5.3 minutes |
Without monitoring, you can't know which of these numbers your site actually delivers.
Diagnose an outage with free tools
- Web Server Test: status code, response time and TLS from several locations.
- Ping Test: is the server reachable at all?
- Traceroute Test: where on the network path does traffic stop?
- DNS Trace Test: does the domain still resolve to the right address?
- Website Speed Test: is the site up but too slow?
Monitor your website 24/7
Dotcom-Monitor has provided website monitoring for over 20 years. It checks your websites, web applications, APIs and servers as often as every minute from more than 30 locations worldwide, and alerts your team by email, SMS or phone when something breaks. Start a free trial.
Frequently asked questions
How do I check if a website is down for everyone or just me?
Run a status check from several locations, such as the Web Server Test on this site. If every location gets an error or a timeout, the site is down for everyone. If the locations succeed but you can't open it, the problem is your network, DNS cache, VPN or firewall.
What is website monitoring?
Website monitoring is the automated, repeated checking of a website from external locations to confirm it is up, fast and working. When a check fails, the monitoring service alerts you by email, SMS or phone, usually within minutes.
What is the difference between uptime monitoring and website monitoring?
Uptime monitoring only checks that a site responds. Website monitoring usually also measures response time, verifies content and SSL certificates, and can test multi-step transactions such as login or checkout in a real browser.
How often should a website be checked?
For business-critical sites, every 1 to 5 minutes from at least two or three locations, so that a single slow network path doesn't trigger false alarms and real outages are caught within minutes.
Is there free website monitoring?
Dotcom-Tools offers free one-off checks, such as the website status check and speed test. Continuous 24/7 monitoring with alerts is a paid service; Dotcom-Monitor offers a free trial.
Why is my website down?
Common causes are an overloaded or crashed server, an expired SSL certificate, an expired domain or a DNS error, a failed deployment, a hosting or CDN outage, and network routing problems. The status code and the error from each location point to the cause.
Last updated: