Site monitoring is an automated set of checks that watches your website and alerts you when it goes down, starts erroring out, or shows signs that something on the site or server needs attention.
Think of it as a smoke alarm for your website: it pings your site from outside your hosting account every few minutes and tells you fast when visitors cannot load pages or complete actions. That matters for Orlando and Central Florida businesses because leads do not wait, if your site is down during a stormy afternoon or a busy weekend, the next call often goes to a competitor.
In managed hosting, monitoring usually covers a mix of availability, security signals, and performance. If you are on WordPress hosting with active management, we typically pair monitoring with response steps so an alert is not just noise, it becomes a fix.
| What monitoring checks | What it alerts you about | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime and reachability | Site is “down,” timeouts, connection failures | Hosting outage, DNS issue, server overload, firewall block, or a bad deploy |
| HTTP errors | Spikes in 500 errors, 404s on main pages, redirect loops | Plugin/theme conflict, broken rewrite rules, missing page, or misconfigured redirects |
| Response time | Pages suddenly load much slower than normal | Traffic spike, database slowdown, heavy plugin, bad cache, or server resources getting squeezed |
| SSL certificate status | Certificate expiring soon or invalid certificate | Renewal failed or a certificate mismatch, which can trigger browser warnings and lost form submissions |
| DNS and domain status | DNS not resolving, nameserver changes, domain renewal risk | Registrar billing issue, accidental DNS edits, or propagation problems after changes |
| Critical page content | A page is missing expected text (or shows unexpected text) | Checkout/booking embed broke, a form script failed, or a page was altered in a way you did not intend |
| Security signals | Malware indicators, file changes, suspicious spikes | Compromise attempt, vulnerable plugin, or bot activity that needs blocking and cleanup |
| Backups and scheduled tasks | Backup failed, cron jobs not running, updates causing errors | Storage issues, permission problems, or a change that needs rollback |
Alerts are only helpful when they are routed to the right person and tied to a clear next step. For example, if your law firm site throws a 500 error at 8:30 AM, you want an alert that goes to the person who can roll back the change or restart the service, not a generic inbox that gets checked once a day.
If you also care about the visitor experience side of monitoring, our FAQ on the 3-second rule for website speed explains why slowdowns can cost calls even when the site is technically “up.”
If you tell us what platform you are on (WordPress, Shopify, custom) and what matters most (calls, bookings, payments, lead forms), we can recommend the monitoring checks that match how your business actually makes money.
