Guides 6 min read
301 vs 302 Redirects: Which to Use and How to Check Them
Permanent or temporary, 301 or 308, 302 or 307: what each redirect tells browsers and search engines, how to avoid chains and loops, and how to check one.
ReadGuides for staying up.
Practical guides and articles about uptime monitoring, SSL certificates, DNS, cron jobs, servers and status pages, from the team behind Uptimecheck.
Guides 6 min read
How to Monitor a Website for Free (and When to Pay)
Four free ways to watch a website, from a cron script to free checkers, what each one misses, and the signs that it is time to pay for monitoring.
ReadGuides 5 min read
Incident Communication: A Plan and Templates for Every Stage
How to tell customers about an outage: who speaks, how often, on which channel and in what words. A one-page plan, severity levels, update cadence and ready-to-use templates for status pages, email and social media.
ReadGuides 6 min read
SPF, DKIM and DMARC Explained: Set Them Up Without Breaking Email
SPF, DKIM and DMARC decide whether your email reaches the inbox and whether others can send as your domain. What each record does, how to set them up safely and the mistakes that quietly break delivery.
ReadGuides 5 min read
500 Internal Server Error: How to Find and Fix the Cause
A 500 Internal Server Error means the application failed while handling the request. Where to find the real error message, the causes behind most 500s and how to make sure you hear about them first.
ReadGuides 6 min read
504 Gateway Timeout: What It Means and How to Fix It
A 504 Gateway Timeout means a proxy waited for the server behind it and gave up. How to find the slow part, fix it instead of just raising timeouts, and see slowdowns before they turn into 504s.
ReadGuides 6 min read
502 Bad Gateway: What It Means and How to Fix It
A 502 Bad Gateway means a proxy, load balancer or CDN got no valid answer from the server behind it. How to find which layer failed, fix the usual causes and catch the next 502 before customers do.
ReadAgencies 7 min read
Website Maintenance Checklist: Weekly, Monthly and Yearly Tasks
A practical website maintenance checklist with weekly, monthly and yearly tasks: backups, updates, security, certificates, domains, DNS, performance and uptime reports for clients.
ReadMonitoring 7 min read
Server Monitoring Alert Thresholds That Don’t Wake You Up for Nothing
Good server alert thresholds catch a filling disk or a memory leak early without paging anyone for a harmless spike. Starting values for CPU, load, RAM, swap, disk, network and reboots.
ReadGuides 6 min read
MTTR, MTTA and MTBF Explained (and How to Improve Them)
MTTR, MTTA and MTBF measure how fast you fix incidents, how fast you respond and how often things break. Formulas, a worked example and practical ways to improve each one.
ReadGuides 5 min read
API Monitoring Checklist: What to Check Beyond a 200 OK
An API can return 200 and still be broken. A practical checklist for API monitoring: methods, headers, request bodies, authentication, expected responses and response time thresholds.
ReadGuides 7 min read
How to Build a Health Check Endpoint (and Monitor It)
A health check endpoint tells monitors and load balancers whether your app can serve requests. What to check, how to keep it fast and safe, code for Laravel, Express and Flask, and how to monitor it.
ReadDowntime is obsolete.
Set up your first monitor in under a minute, or look around the live demo first.
14-day free trial · No credit card required