Why website monitoring is the best investment you'll make this year

Downtime happens. Certificates expire. Links break. But here's the thing - the faster you know about it, the less it hurts. Let me tell you why monitoring changed everything for us.

The 3 AM wake-up call nobody wants

Picture this: it's 3 AM on a Saturday. Your phone buzzes. A customer just emailed you - your website has been down for the past four hours. Four hours of lost sales, frustrated visitors, and a search engine that's now questioning your reliability.

Would you have known about this if that customer hadn't reached out? If you're like most of us before we started monitoring properly - probably not.

It's not just about uptime

Here's what most people get wrong about monitoring: they think it's just about checking if the server responds. But there's so much more that can go sideways:

• SSL certificates expire - and browsers will scare away your visitors with big red warnings
• Links break - that blog post you linked to? Gone. Now you're sending people to 404 pages
• DNS changes - someone tweaked a record and suddenly your emails aren't arriving
• Scheduled tasks fail silently - your daily backup hasn't run in two weeks, and you had no idea
• Performance degrades - your site loads in 8 seconds instead of 2, and users are bouncing

Each of these can hurt your business. And the worst part? They often happen silently, without anyone noticing until real damage is done.

The real cost of not monitoring

Let's be honest about the numbers. A single hour of downtime can cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of euros - depending on your traffic and business model. But it's not just the direct revenue loss:

• SEO rankings drop when Google sees your site is unreliable
• Customer trust erodes with each bad experience
• Your team wastes hours firefighting instead of building

Compare that to the cost of monitoring - typically a few euros per month - and the ROI becomes pretty clear.

What good monitoring looks like

We built Oh Dear because we needed something that actually works for developers and agencies. Not another dashboard you'll forget to check, but proactive alerts that reach you wherever you are - Slack, Discord, email, SMS, PagerDuty, you name it.

The key is getting notified before your customers do. When your SSL certificate is about to expire in 14 days, you should know. When a page starts returning 500 errors, you should know within a minute. When your cron jobs stop running, you should know immediately.

Start monitoring today

If you're not monitoring your sites yet, start today. Seriously. Set up uptime monitoring at the very minimum - it takes five minutes and could save you hours of headaches.

And if you want the full picture - uptime, SSL, broken links, scheduled tasks, performance, and more - well, you know where to find us. We've made it super simple to get started, no credit card required.

Because downtime happens. But how quickly you respond? That's entirely up to you.