Monitoring All Your Client Sites from One Dashboard

Uptime Monitoring

Uptime monitoring sounds simple: check if the site responds, send an alert if it does not. In practice, doing it reliably at scale is harder than it looks. Transient network blips, CDN caching, and server maintenance windows all generate false positives that waste your time.

mySites.guru's uptime monitoring runs its own engine on dedicated infrastructure, separate from the main platform. The monitoring engine checks 80,000+ sites and uses a three-step verification process before sending any alert:

1. HEAD request - a lightweight probe to check if the server responds at all
2. GET request - a full page fetch to confirm the site actually serves content
3. GET from a different global location - a second full fetch from a separate network location to rule out regional issues

Only after all three fail does an alert go out - which eliminates the noise that plagues simpler monitoring tools and means every alert you receive is worth acting on.

The system was built after the previous third-party monitoring provider (UptimeRobot) had reliability issues and attempted a 352% price increase. (mySites.guru subscribers who were previously using UptimeRobot's public status pages can read about the free status page alternative built into the platform.) For agencies that want to understand the technical details behind uptime checking, uptime monitoring explained covers the methodology, including why HEAD requests fail when GET requests succeed, how timeout thresholds work, and what to do when monitoring reports downtime but the site loads fine in your browser.

SSL, Disk Space, and Server Health

A site can be "up" and still have problems. These are the slow-motion failures that monitoring catches before they become emergencies:

• SSL certificate expiry - an expiring certificate turns a working site into a browser warning page, driving visitors away instantly
• Disk space exhaustion - a full disk crashes databases and corrupts backups, often without warning
• Server health checks - ongoing verification that the site is responding correctly, not just returning an error page with a 200 status

SSL certificate expiration tracking shows all upcoming certificate expirations across your entire portfolio in a single view. You see which certificates expire in the next 7, 14, or 30 days and can take action before browsers start showing warnings to your clients' visitors.

Disk space warnings alert you when any connected site's server is running low on storage. This is especially important for sites with active backup schedules, large media libraries, or logging that grows over time. The warning gives you time to clean up or expand storage before the site goes down.

File Change Detection and Alerts

Uptime monitoring tells you when a site is down. File change detection tells you when something has changed that should not have. They are different problems with different causes, and you need both.

Real-time alerting goes beyond uptime. You can configure notifications for:

• File modifications - any file that changes outside a known update window
• New admin users - an account that nobody on your team created is a serious warning sign
• Plugin activations or deactivations - unexpected plugin changes can signal a compromise or misconfiguration
• Admin logins - know when someone accesses the backend of any client site

The alert system is configurable per site and per event type. You might want file change alerts on production sites but not on development servers, or admin login alerts on client sites but not on your internal staging environment. Configure what matters, ignore what doesn't. Pairing alerts with a consistent maintenance schedule is the most reliable approach - see scheduling audits, updates, and backups for how to build that routine.