Siteavail Uptime Observatory
Ongoing research into the reliability of real-world business websites.
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 monitor identifies itself honestly in every request:
SiteavailObservatory/1.0 (+https://www.siteavail.com/observatory)
How It Works
- One page, low frequency. We request a single page (the homepage) of each monitored site, typically once every 10 minutes. We do not crawl, spider, or fetch any other pages, images, or assets.
- Tiny footprint. Each check reads at most the first 16 KB of the response — roughly the size of one small image — and then closes the connection.
- Two vantage points. Checks come from two independent networks so that a network problem on our side is never mistaken for an outage of your site.
- 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 each check we record the HTTP status, response time, and — for failed checks — a short response excerpt sufficient to categorize the failure (server error, hosting-account suspension page, expired certificate, and so on). Successful checks are kept only as hourly aggregate statistics. We do not store page content from healthy sites, and we never republish anything we retrieve.
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?
The observatory is run by Siteavail (MRN24 LLC). For anything else — methodology questions, data requests, or just curiosity — write to [email protected].