Uptime Observatory — Siteavail

Last updated: September 30, 2026

What This Is

Siteavail builds website backup and failover services. As part of that work, the Uptime Observatory continuously monitors the availability of a panel of business websites to understand how often real-world sites go down, for how long, and why — data that is surprisingly hard to find outside the largest platforms.

If you found this page from your server logs, it's because our checks identify themselves honestly:

SiteavailObservatory/2.0 (+https://www.siteavail.com/observatory)

How It Works

One page, low frequency. Our checks request only the homepage of each monitored site, typically once every 10 minutes, and read at most the first 16 KB of the response — roughly the size of one small image — before closing the connection. We do not crawl or spider your site.
Confirmed from several networks. When a check fails, we recheck about once a minute, then confirm the failure from a second, independent network and through a few Globalping probes on home internet connections (those requests come from Globalping, not from us), so that a problem on our side is never mistaken for an outage of your site.
A screenshot of a real outage. If an outage lasts 15 minutes, we load the homepage once in a headless Chromium browser, which also fetches its images, styles, and scripts, to record what visitors saw.
Before we reach out. Once a significant outage is over, we take one more screenshot of the recovered homepage, and read the homepage, up to three contact or about pages it links to, and its /.well-known/security.txt to find who to contact.
We back off. If a site responds with 403 or 429, or presents a bot challenge, we reduce checking frequency for that site and eventually stop monitoring it entirely.

What We Store

For a failed check we record the HTTP status or error, the response time, and a short excerpt of the response, enough to categorize the failure (server error, hosting-account suspension page, expired certificate, and so on). For a successful check we keep only its time. We keep the outage screenshots and, after a significant outage, the recovered-site screenshot and the contact details we found. When we add a site to the panel, we note basic facts from its homepage, such as its title and platform. We never publish anything we retrieve; outage screenshots go only to the site's owner, if we write to them.

Why We Do This

Downtime is the problem Siteavail exists to solve. The observatory tells us — with real measurements instead of guesses — how reliable real-world web hosting actually is. Occasionally, when we observe that a site has had a significant outage, we may reach out to the site's owner to let them know what we saw and how a standby copy of their site would have helped. We only ever contact a site after it has recovered, and every such message includes a working unsubscribe.

Opting Out

If you'd prefer we not monitor your site, email [email protected] with the domain name and we'll remove it within 48 hours. Opt-outs are permanent — we maintain a suppression list that survives panel rebuilds.

Questions?