Sometimes you’ll receive alerts that you think can’t possibly be right. But our monitors are almost always right and it’s worth understanding any exception.

Here are some possible reasons you might be getting more alerts than you expected, or alerts you think should be ignored...

If your web site goes down at approximately the same time every day, it could be that your web server is actually going out of service for log rotation or software updates, or something that in general should not take it down, but actually is. You should look into this.

Application-server failures and gateway failures do occur. You may not be aware of how often they occur or whether they are periodic or random.

Our monitors will report them to you, so you should take advantage of this information if you can. We love 100% performance!

Slow page loads might indicate that you’re experiencing a DDoS attack, or just that your server is under heavy load. We will alert you every time we think your server is slow—meaning every time it takes more than 20 seconds to open a connection and more than 30 seconds to serve up your page.

And finally, we may come under attack, or our cloud hosting provider may come under attack, slowing our access to your site even when your site is performing perfectly. We would rather be conservative and let you know about problems than miss a potential DDoS attack against you because we were too slow to alert you.