Guides

These guides are for people who look after other people's websites. Each one answers a real question that MSPs and small IT shops run into, from uptime math to certificates, domains, DNS, status pages, and alerts.

Calculator

• How much downtime is 99.9% uptime?
  99.9% uptime allows 8 hours 45 minutes 36 seconds of downtime in a 365-day year, 43 minutes 12 seconds in a 30-day month, and 1 minute 26 seconds a day.

Checklists

• How to keep SSL certificates current
  Inventory every hostname, record who renews each certificate, and alert before expiry. Public lifetimes fall to 200 days in 2026, 100 in 2027, and 47 in 2029.

Comparisons

• Pingdom alternatives for MSPs
  Pingdom, UptimeRobot, Better Stack, StatusCake, HetrixTools, and The Watchbill compared on price, interval, status pages, and whether alerts become tickets.

Guides

• How an MSP picks an uptime monitor
  Choose a monitor priced per check, with one status page per client and a path into the PSA. Confirm outages first. Trial a single client site before rollout.
• How to hear when DNS records change
  Compare A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, and TXT answers with a saved baseline and alert when they differ. That catches edits and account takeovers before users notice.
• How to reduce false uptime alerts
  Confirm an outage before you alert, by consecutive failures or several locations, and alert only on a state change. You wait longer and page people less often.
• How uptime alerts become PSA tickets
  Point down and recovery mail at the mailbox your PSA already turns into tickets, then parse a stable subject so one ticket opens and the recovery can close it.
• Should maintenance count on an SLA?
  Schedule the window, tell the client, and suppress alerts only for the checks you touch. An SLA can exclude that time when the contract's notice rules were met.
• What a client status page should show
  Show each service in plain words, when an incident started, recent history, and who to contact. Keep the client status link private until you mean to share it.
• What happens when a domain expires
  When a domain expires, DNS usually stops within days, so the site and email fail. Most gTLDs then allow 30 days of redemption after deletion, at extra cost.
• Which HTTP codes count as downtime
  Most uptime checks treat 2xx as up and treat 5xx, timeouts, and TLS failures as down. Redirects and 4xx are judgment calls you should test on your monitor.

Glossary

• Uptime monitoring glossary for MSPs
  Plain definitions of uptime, SLA, SLO, checks, status pages, DNS, certificates, and the alert words an MSP uses when a client site stops answering visitors.