The problem
Clients on care plans expect you to know when their site is down before they do. If an agency checks 10 client sites by hand once a week at 3 minutes each, that's 30 minutes a week, about 129 minutes (2.2 hours) a month, and a shop site can still be down overnight before anyone notices.
What the AI does
UptimeRobot checks each site at a set interval and alerts you when it stops responding. The Free plan has 50 monitors and 5-minute checks, but the page describes it as good for hobby and non-profit projects, so an agency monitoring client sites for a fee should use a paid plan. Solo adds 60-second checks and 3 status pages, and email, SMS and voice call alerts, and its monitor selector offers 10 or 50 monitors. Monitor one page per site, the home page, so 10 sites fit Solo's 10 monitors; checking extra pages (checkout, contact form) needs the 50-monitor tier, whose price the page does not show. It tells you a site is down; it does not fix it or tell you why. Your hosting arrangements and who responds out of hours stay with you.
A worked example
A three-person web design agency in Norwich has 10 clients on monthly care plans and checks their sites by hand once a week.
Before
10 sites checked by hand at 3 minutes each, weekly: 30 minutes a week, about 129 minutes (2.2 hours) a month
After
If alerts replace the weekly check and a 5-minute weekly look at the dashboard confirms the monitors are running: about 22 minutes a month (0.4 hours)
What it's worth
About 1.8 hours a month saved (107 minutes), worth about £63 at £35 an hour. Cost: Solo with 10 monitors is €10 (about £9) a month on monthly billing, or €9 (about £8) a month billed yearly. The larger saving is not counted: finding out about an outage within a minute instead of from an unhappy client. The page does not show a price for the 50-monitor tier.
How to set it up
- List your client sites and decide which pages to monitor (the home page and the checkout or contact page if there is one).
- Start on the Free plan to learn the dashboard, then move to Solo before monitoring paying clients' sites.
- Add a monitor for each site and set the alert to email and SMS for the person on call.
- Test an alert by pointing a test monitor at a page that does not exist.
- Write into your care plan what you will do when an alert fires and when, so clients know what they are paying for.
What goes wrong
- An alert means the site did not respond, not that you know why. The cause may be the host, the domain or an expired certificate.
- Don't promise uptime figures in a care plan that depend on a host you do not control.
- Alerts go to a person. If nobody is watching email or SMS at night, the monitoring has not done its job.
- A monitor that is paused or deleted by mistake fails silently; check the dashboard regularly.