Expiry & Resolution · Beginner · 20 minutes of setup
How to monitor website uptime — Monitor the Registration as Well as the Server
The outage that costs most is not the server falling over — it is the name quietly ceasing to resolve while every monitor you own reports a timeout and nothing else.
The short answer
Watch four things, not one: that the name still resolves, that the registration has not lapsed, that the delegation is still pointing where you left it, and only then that the server returns a page. An HTTP monitor alone reports the same red dot for a crashed server and an expired domain, and the two have very different fixes.
Set the checks up outside your own hosting, on a service that also tracks certificate and domain expiry, and route the alerts somewhere that interrupts you. Twenty minutes of setup at beginner level.
The registry sequence after an expiry is roughly thirty days of grace, then redemption at a steep fee, then auction for anything anybody wants. Monitoring is what keeps you in the first of those three.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
Beginner
Level assumed
Quick
Time to allow
5
Stages in the guide
24/7
Desk cover
This is the one page in the library about noticing rather than doing, and it earns its place because the failure it catches is the one no amount of hosting redundancy protects you from.
Nothing here changes a record. You are adding observers outside your own infrastructure, which is exactly where they have to sit to be worth anything.
Twenty minutes now, and the difference between hearing about an outage from a monitor and hearing about it from a customer.
Four failures that look identical from outside
A page that will not load has at least four distinct causes and one symptom. The server may be down. The zone may have lost the A record. The delegation may have been changed, deliberately or otherwise, so a different provider is now answering. Or the registration may have expired, at which point the registry stops publishing your nameservers and the name resolves to nothing anywhere.
A plain HTTP monitor cannot tell these apart. It reports a timeout and leaves you to work out which of the four you are in, usually at the least convenient hour.
The registry clock is the check nobody sets
Expiry dates do not announce themselves. A card lapses, a renewal notice goes to a mailbox nobody reads, and the name stops resolving on a date that was in the record all along. What follows is roughly thirty days of grace during which a renewal still recovers it, then redemption at a steep registry fee, then auction if the name has value to anybody else.
Auto-renew and a card in date make the whole sequence irrelevant. A monitor watching the expiry date is the belt to that braces, and it costs nothing to add. Send the renewal notices to a shared mailbox rather than to a person who might change jobs.
Watch the delegation, not just the response
Nameserver changes are a legitimate part of running a name, which is exactly why an unexpected one deserves an alert. A monitor that records the current nameservers and tells you when they change will catch a compromised registrar account long before a defaced homepage would.
The same reasoning covers the MX rows. Mail redirection is the quiet version of a takeover, and it fails in the direction of nobody noticing.
Probe a page that proves something
Point the HTTP check at a real page and match on a keyword inside it. A homepage answering 200 over a dead database will fool a naive check; content verification will not.
Where the check runs matters as much as what it checks. Put it on infrastructure entirely separate from your hosting, and use a service that probes from more than one location, so a regional network fault reads as a regional fault rather than as an outage.
Route the alert where it will interrupt you. Pair email with a channel that actually gets attention: a push notification, or SMS for anything mission-critical. An alert read four hours later is history rather than a warning.
Then read the monthly record. Uptime history separates a blip from a pattern, and recurring micro-outages at the same hour tell a diagnosable story that a single incident never will.
What we are watching from our side
The uptime target on our platform is 99.9%, watched around the clock, and the support desk is staffed every hour of every day — which matters here because DNS and expiry problems surface when a cached answer runs out rather than during office hours.
For a name registered with us, the renewal date, the auto-renew setting, the lock and the contact details are all in the same login as the records themselves. There is nothing to reconcile between two providers when a renewal notice needs chasing.
- A 99.9% uptime target, watched around the clock
- Nameservers, contacts, privacy and locks in one place
- Renewal billed at the figure you registered at
- A desk staffed every hour of every day
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Four checks, not one
Resolution, registration, delegation and response are monitored separately, because a single red dot covering all four tells you nothing about the fix.
The expiry date, watched
The failure no redundancy protects against gets its own monitor, alongside the auto-renew setting that should make it academic.
Delegation changes flagged
An unexpected nameserver or MX change is the earliest visible sign of a compromised registrar account, and it is trivial to alert on.
Checks that cannot lie to you
Keyword matching inside a real page, probed from several locations outside your own hosting, so a 200 over a dead database is caught.
Alerts that arrive in time
Email plus something that interrupts. A notification read four hours later has stopped being a warning and become a record.
Twenty minutes, then nothing
Setup is short and the ongoing cost is reading a monthly summary. The pattern in that summary is where the real diagnosis lives.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Put the monitor outside your own hosting
A free uptime service checking every minute, running on infrastructure entirely separate from yours. The outside vantage point is the whole idea: the site has to be checked from where visitors stand.
- 2
Add a DNS and expiry check to the same account
Most monitors will track domain expiry, certificate expiry and the current nameservers. Turn all three on — they cost nothing extra and they cover the failures an HTTP check cannot see.
- 3
Probe a real page with a keyword match
Point the check at content, not at the root, and match on a string inside it. A homepage returning 200 over a dead database fools a naive check; content verification does not.
- 4
Send alerts to something that interrupts
Email plus a push notification, and SMS for anything mission-critical. Route renewal notices to a shared mailbox rather than to one person's inbox.
- 5
Read the monthly history
One incident usually reveals nothing. Recurring micro-outages at the same hour are a pattern, and a pattern is something a support desk can act on.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- A 99.9% uptime target, watched around the clock
- A desk staffed every hour of every day
- Nameservers, contacts, privacy and locks in one place
- Renewal billed at the figure you registered at
- The registration recorded in your own details
- First year of the registration included on an annual order
- DDoS traffic filtered at the network edge
- A daily copy taken, with restores you run yourself
- Mailboxes answering at the name you hold
- Thirty days' money back on hosting plans, seven on reseller
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
My monitor says the site is down but the domain has expired — which is it?
Check whether the name resolves at all. An expired registration means the registry stops publishing your nameservers, so there is no answer to be had from anywhere and every monitor reports a timeout. A live server with a dead name looks identical from outside. If resolution has failed, the fix is at the registrar and not on the machine: renew inside the grace period, which runs roughly thirty days, before redemption fees enter the picture.
Should I get an alert when my nameservers change?
Yes, and it is one of the most useful alerts you can set. You will change delegation deliberately perhaps once a year, so any unexpected change is either a mistake or somebody in your registrar account. The same applies to the MX rows, where a quiet redirection of mail is far more valuable to an attacker than a defaced homepage and far less likely to be noticed.
How much uptime should I expect?
We commit to 99.9%, which allows roughly 43 minutes a month and is rarely approached in practice. Monitoring earns its keep by catching the exceptions quickly and by holding any provider to account with data rather than impressions.
What is the fastest way to prevent an expiry outage altogether?
Auto-renew on everything you hold, a card that does not expire mid-year, and renewal notices going to a shared mailbox somebody actually reads. Keep one register of your names and review it monthly. For any name you have deliberately chosen not to auto-renew, put a diary entry a fortnight before the date — the grace period is not a plan.
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Watch the name, not only the server.
A 99.9% uptime target watched around the clock, renewals at the figure you registered at, and a desk that answers at any hour.
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