Playbook: set up uptime monitoring that catches real outages

Playbook: set up uptime monitoring that catches real outages

A single ping from one location misses half of downtime. Configure properly:
— Check from 3+ regions; require 2 to agree before alerting to kill false positives
— Monitor a real transaction (login, checkout), not just the homepage 200
— Add SSL-expiry and DNS checks — most "outages" are expired certs
— Set the interval to 1 min for revenue pages, 5 min for the rest to control cost

UptimeRobot
👍 50 monitors free, 5-min checks, simple
👎 free tier is 5-min only, no transaction checks until paid

Better Stack
👍 30-sec checks, incident pages, on-call scheduling
👎 $25/mo+, more than a solo site needs

Verdict: UptimeRobot for a hobby site, Better Stack if downtime costs you money per minute.

Best for: webmasters tired of users reporting outages first.

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