Free website monitoring tools can be genuinely useful. They're the right starting point for a side project, a small business website, or a team that just wants to know when their homepage goes down. But "free" always comes with trade-offs, and those trade-offs have a habit of revealing themselves at the worst possible moment: peak...

A few years ago, this was just part of doing business online. Today, it’s a problem you can avoid, thanks to artificial intelligence. We’ve quietly reached an important turning point in website monitoring.

For most of the internet’s history, monitoring meant setting thresholds: set a number, wait for it to be crossed, get an alert, and ...

Before getting into specific recommendations, it is worth separating the two distinct threats that network admins need to monitor for, because most tools handle one well and the other poorly.

Resolution failures are operational. A nameserver goes down. A zone transfer breaks. A record expires. A propagation delay means half your users i...

Without Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) monitoring, your digital experience monitoring (DEM) stack can't detect the route hijacks, leaks, or instability that prevent users from reaching your applications. Most DEM stacks miss this entirely, and that gap is where some of the most damaging, hardest-to-diagnose outages happen.

Every plan...

Most of the time, the culprit is invisible: a broken DNS record. When DNS works, nobody notices. But when it breaks, everything breaks — regardless of how healthy your infrastructure is underneath.

DNS breaks more often than most teams expect. Yet many teams still find out about DNS failures from users, not dashboards.

A multi-homed website is hosted behind servers connected to two or more internet providers, each with its own IP address. DNS rotates traffic between those IPs—and that rotation is exactly what makes standard monitoring unreliable.

Think of it this way: your monitoring tool checks "yourwebsite.com," DNS picks an IP at random, an...

HTTP status codes are the foundation of REST monitoring. Each endpoint maps to a specific resource—GET /users, POST /orders, DELETE /sessions—and returns a code that communicates the outcome: 2xx for success, 4xx for client errors, 5xx for server failures. You monitor each route independently, set alerting thresholds per endpoint, and aggrega...