<b>Q: Is a 1-minute check interval worth paying for, or is 5 minutes fine?</b>

<b>Q: Is a 1-minute check interval worth paying for, or is 5 minutes fine?</b>

A: Do the worst-case math instead of guessing. Your worst-case detection delay is one interval plus one confirmation cycle. At 5 minutes with a single retry, an outage can run ~10 minutes before you even get paged. At 1 minute, that's ~2 minutes.

So the question is: what does 8 extra minutes of silent downtime cost you? For a checkout or ad-landing page pulling paid traffic, that's real money and wasted spend, so 1-minute pays for itself fast. For a blog or docs site, 5 minutes is genuinely fine.

The trap: paying for 1-minute checks while routing alerts to email you read hourly. Tighten the interval and the alert channel together, or you've bought nothing.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.