Guides
Website health, explained in plain English
Short, honest guides to the things that take websites offline — 500s, bad gateways, DNS failures, expired certificates, sites that crawl — plus practical setups for monitoring WordPress, Shopify and your own servers. Each one answers the question first, in plain English, and most end with a free way to check your own site.
Errors & outages
- Why a website can be down for some people but not othersDNS caching, regional outages, and how to tell what is really happening.
- What causes a 500 error (and what to do)The plain-English version of "Internal Server Error", and your next steps.
- What causes a 502 bad gateway (and what to do)The middleman between visitors and your app is getting bad answers.
- What causes a 503 error (and what to do)Your server is up but refusing work — overload, maintenance, or a stuck app.
- What to send your hosting provider during an outage (templates)Copy-paste messages that get useful answers from support, faster.
DNS & SSL
Speed
How to monitor
- Ping vs HTTP monitoring: what actually tells you your site worksWhy a server that answers ping can still serve a broken website.
- How to monitor a WordPress websitePlugins break sites at 2am — an outside-in check catches it first.
- How to monitor a Shopify domainShopify keeps the platform up; your domain wiring is on you.
- How to monitor a Vultr serverVultr watches the host machine — nobody watches your app unless you do.
- Monitoring AWS, Azure and DigitalOcean servicesCloud consoles say “healthy” — that’s not the same as “your site works.”