Is the website down?

FAQ (Why is Website Down?)

• How can I check if my website is down?

  Paste the URL into the checker above. Pulsetic runs a live test from 15 locations across 5 continents and reports the response time and HTTP status code each one got back, so a regional failure is easy to tell apart from a total outage. Testing from outside your own network matters too. If the site loads for everyone but you, the cause is usually a stale DNS entry or something cached in your browser rather than the server.

• What causes a website to go down?

  Hosting and server failures are the most common, followed by expired domains and SSL certificates, DNS misconfiguration, traffic spikes that exhaust resources, botched deployments, and DDoS attacks. The status code narrows it down fast. A 500 means the application itself threw an error, a 502 or 504 means something upstream stopped answering, and a 503 usually means the server is overloaded or in maintenance mode. Whatever the code says, work out when it started. A deploy, a certificate renewal, or a config change at the same timestamp is usually your answer.

• How often should I check my website's status?

  Checking by hand almost never catches anything. Outages are short and they do not wait for you to look, which is why monitoring has to run continuously. Pulsetic checks from every location you enable, every 5 minutes on the free plan and as often as every 30 seconds from the Team plan. The interval is not a detail either. Even 99.9 percent uptime leaves almost 9 hours of downtime in a year, and however long your interval is, that is roughly how long an outage can run before anyone hears about it.

• Can my website experience temporary downtime without any major issues?

  Yes, and most visitors never notice. Deployments, server restarts, DNS changes still propagating, and planned maintenance all produce short gaps. What matters is separating those from the real thing. One failed check that passes on the next run is noise. Failures repeating across several regions are not. If you are taking the site down on purpose, return a 503 with a Retry-After header so search engines treat it as temporary.

• How can I minimize website downtime?

  Most of it is unglamorous. Pick hosting you trust, put a CDN in front of it so a traffic spike does not take the origin with it, keep backups running automatically, and renew domains and SSL certificates long before the expiry date rather than on it. Ship releases in stages so a bad one can be pulled back in minutes. Then monitor continuously from more than one location, because an outage lasts from the moment it starts until the moment somebody finds out, and that second half is the part you control.

• Are there any warning signs before a website goes down?

  Usually. Response times creep up, requests start timing out here and there, the share of 5xx responses climbs, memory or CPU sits near the ceiling, and a certificate edges toward its expiry date. None of that looks dramatic on its own, which is exactly why it gets missed. Reading response time as a trend line rather than a single number is what turns it into a warning you can act on.

• Can I receive notifications when my website goes down?

  Yes. Pulsetic sends alerts by email and webhooks on every plan, and by SMS, WhatsApp, phone call, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Telegram from the Solo plan, so it reaches whoever is on call in whatever they already have open. A webhook can also hand the alert to PagerDuty. Before any of that fires, a second location has to confirm the failure. One check failing from one node is far more often a network hiccup than an outage, and nobody should be woken up for it.

• Can I communicate with my customers during website downtime?

  Yes. On every plan, a public status page on your own domain shows visitors the live status of the monitors you put on it. From the Solo plan you can add your colors and logo, post updates on what is broken and what you are doing about it, and let visitors subscribe by email. Those email updates are often the difference between a handful of support tickets and a hundred. Saying nothing during an outage costs more trust than the outage itself.

• Can website downtime affect my SEO ranking?

  It can. If Googlebot keeps hitting 5xx errors, it may drop the affected pages from results until the site answers properly again, and a long outage chips away at the page-experience signals tied to availability and speed. A brief blip served as a 503 is generally harmless. Repeated or extended downtime is not, and by the time rankings move, the lost orders have usually cost more than the lost positions.

• Can I track historical website downtime data?

  Yes. Pulsetic keeps every incident, response time, and uptime percentage for your plan's history window: 3 months on the free plan, a year on Solo and Team, and 5 years on Organization. Over that window the patterns surface on their own: the failures that only happen at peak traffic, or the ones that always follow a release. It is also what you point at when a customer asks whether you met the SLA, rather than reconstructing the month from memory and Slack scrollback.