How often should a website be checked?
The interval between checks decides the shortest outage your monitoring can notice and how long you wait to hear about a long one.
What the interval changes
- How fast you hear. With checks every five minutes, an outage can run for almost five minutes before the first failed check, and longer before it is confirmed.
- What you see at all. A site that is down for three minutes can fall between two five-minute checks and never show up. With a check every minute it shows up every time.
- How accurate the uptime figure is. Uptime is counted from checks. Fewer checks mean a rougher number.
Is every minute too much for a server?
One request a minute is 1,440 requests a day, less than a single visitor who browses a few pages. A normal web server does not notice it. If your site is unusually heavy, point the monitor at a light page such as the home page.
Why a longer interval is sometimes offered
Checking less often costs the monitoring service less, so free plans and cheap tiers often check every five, ten or thirty minutes. That is fine for a site nobody depends on. For a shop, a booking page or a login, the minutes matter.
What KeenCrow does
Every paid plan checks every minute (the free plan checks one website every 5 minutes), and a failure is rechecked after about 20 seconds and again 30 seconds later, so a real outage is confirmed in well under two minutes and a single blip never wakes you up.