In short: Maintena checks that your site is online around the clock, from our own servers. If it ever goes down, we double-check that it is real before emailing you, so you only hear about genuine problems, never false alarms.
What it is
Uptime monitoring answers one question, over and over, on a schedule: is your site reachable right now, and if not, why?
Maintena checks your site from our own servers. The check does not depend on anything installed on your WordPress site, so it keeps working even if your site is completely offline or the plugin is unavailable. We reach out to your site's address, record what happened, and if the result is a genuine change in status we open or close an incident and email your team.
Alongside the raw checks, Uptime gives you three things a simple ping tool does not:
- A re-check guard so a single hiccup never triggers a false alarm.
- Incidents that measure how long an outage lasted, not just isolated dots on a chart.
- Root-cause labels in plain English, so anyone on your team can read why the site was unreachable.
Your uptime results also contribute to your site's overall Health Score.
How it works
The check cadence
Each site is checked on its own schedule. The default is every 5 minutes, and this interval can be adjusted per site if you want more or less frequent checks. Maintena runs continuously in the background, so checks happen around the clock without anything for you to trigger.
The re-check guard (why you don't get false alarms)
Before Maintena ever declares your site down, it re-checks. If the first request does not succeed, the check quietly retries a couple more times, a few seconds apart, before making a decision. By default that is up to three attempts in total.
This is deliberate. Networks drop the occasional request, and a single missed response is not an outage. Only a failure that is confirmed across the re-checks opens an incident or sends an alert. The result is high signal and very little noise.
What counts as "up"
A site is considered reachable when it returns a normal successful response or a redirect. In other words, if your site answers, it counts as up.
Certificate problems are handled separately and on purpose. Maintena does not let a certificate issue masquerade as the site being down. Instead, an SSL/TLS problem is reported as its own root cause, so you see the real reason rather than a misleading "site down".
Incidents: the lifecycle of an outage
When a confirmed outage begins, Maintena opens a single incident and stamps it with the time it started, the status code (if any), and the classified cause. If the site stays down across many checks, they all belong to that one incident, so a long outage reads as one episode rather than dozens of separate alarms.
When your site comes back, the incident is resolved. Maintena records the recovery time and the total duration, giving you clean figures for how long the outage lasted. Incidents form the long-term history of your site's reliability.
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Check | Every probe is recorded, whether up or down. |
| Confirmed down | After the re-checks fail, a new incident opens (if one is not already open). |
| Ongoing | Repeated failed checks stay attached to the same open incident. |
| Recovered | The incident is resolved and stamped with its total duration. |
Root-cause classification
When a check cannot reach your site, Maintena classifies the failure into a plain-English cause so you know where to look. The table below shows the causes you may see and what each one usually points to.
| Cause | Where it points | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| Server error | Server-side | Your server responded with an error (a 5xx response). |
| Rate limited | Server-side | The server is throttling requests (a 429 response). |
| Access blocked | Firewall or authentication | A firewall or login prompt blocked the request (a 401 or 403). |
| Page not found | Configuration | The monitored address returned "not found" (a 404). |
| Client error | Configuration | Another request-side error was returned (a 4xx response). |
| DNS failure | DNS or domain | The domain could not be resolved, often an expired or misconfigured domain. |
| SSL / TLS error | Certificate | A certificate problem prevented a secure connection. |
| Connection refused | Server or network | The server actively refused the connection. |
| Connection timed out | Server or network | The server did not respond in time. |
| Connection failed | Server or network | The site could not be reached for another reason. |
| No response | Unknown | No response was received and no clearer cause could be determined. |
In your dashboard you will also see uptime percentages over the last 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days, a response-time trend, and a timeline of past incidents.
Alerts
You are notified only on real changes in status, and only once per change:
- Down alert: sent when an outage is confirmed. Because of the re-check guard, this fires only after Maintena has verified the site is genuinely unreachable, not on a single dropped request.
- Recovery alert: sent when your site comes back online, so you know the incident is over without having to check.
Noise is kept low by design. The re-check guard filters out momentary blips, a long outage is grouped into a single incident rather than a flood of messages, and each alert fires once per transition (one email when it goes down, one when it recovers).
Where email alerts are enabled, they are sent to your account's primary contact email. If that address is not set, incidents are still tracked and shown in your dashboard, they just are not emailed.
What you need to do
Uptime needs very little from you. In most cases the answer is simply: keep your site connected and monitoring switched on.
- Have your site added to Maintena with uptime monitoring enabled. This is on by default for monitored sites.
- Set a contact email on your account so down and recovery alerts have somewhere to go.
- Adjust the check interval (optional). If you want checks more or less often than the standard cadence, the interval can be changed per site.
- Password-protected or staging sites (optional). If your site sits behind HTTP Basic Authentication (a username and password prompt, common on staging environments), provide those credentials so Maintena can authenticate instead of reading the login prompt as an outage. The password is stored encrypted.
There is no third-party monitoring account to create and no per-site key to manage. Maintena handles the checking for you.
Good to know
- Single checking origin. Maintena checks your site from one location. In rare cases, a network problem between Maintena and your site can look like downtime even when your site is fine for most visitors. The root-cause label helps distinguish these situations.
- Brand-new sites read as healthy. A site with no checks yet is treated as 100% up until real data accumulates. This is an intentional, optimistic starting point.
- "Reachable" is about a response, not content. If your site returns a normal response while showing a maintenance or holding page, it is counted as up, because it is technically reachable.
- How long data is kept. Individual check records are retained for 30 days. Incidents are kept as your long-term reliability history and are not auto-deleted.
- Certificates are their own topic. Uptime flags a certificate problem as a cause, but detailed certificate health (expiry, chain trust) is covered by Maintena's SSL monitoring.