The honest answer is: as often as you would be embarrassed to have been down without knowing. That is a business question rather than a technical one, and it is why the right interval for a checkout page and a marketing blog are not the same number.
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What is the right uptime check interval?
Five minutes is right for most sites and is what we default to. One minute is worth paying for on revenue paths — checkout, login, payment APIs — where every extra minute of undetected downtime has a number attached. Anything slower than fifteen minutes has stopped being monitoring and become reporting. Faster than thirty seconds is rarely worth the false positives it buys.
Check interval is the setting people choose once, at signup, and never revisit. It is also the setting that determines how long your site can be down before anybody knows, and on a lot of monitoring products it is the single biggest driver of what you pay.
This guide covers the arithmetic — blind window, checks per month, and what that costs under each pricing model — and then the part most guides skip, which is why checking faster eventually makes your monitoring worse rather than better.
Detection time is the interval plus however long confirmation takes.
Your blind window is the worst case gap between an outage starting and a check noticing it. If you check every five minutes, an outage that begins immediately after a successful check goes unnoticed for up to five minutes. Add whatever your tool does to confirm a failure before alerting, and that is your real detection time.
The second column below matters commercially. Tools that sell check runs rather than monitor slots make frequency the thing that consumes your allowance, and the numbers get large faster than people expect — one URL checked every minute is over forty thousand checks a month.
| Interval | Worst-case blind window | Checks per month, one URL | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 seconds | 30 seconds | ~86,400 | Payment APIs, trading, high-volume checkout |
| 1 minute | 1 minute | ~43,200 | Checkout, login, revenue-critical paths |
| 5 minutes | 5 minutes | ~8,640 | Most business sites — a sensible default |
| 15 minutes | 15 minutes | ~2,900 | Low-traffic sites, internal tools |
| 1 hour | 1 hour | ~720 | Reporting, not monitoring |
Two pricing models, and frequency behaves completely differently under each.
Under metered pricing you buy check runs, so the interval is a direct multiplier on your bill. Moving one monitor from five minutes to one minute multiplies its consumption by five. This is why so many metered monitoring setups quietly degrade to slower intervals over time — somebody looked at the invoice.
Under slot pricing you buy a number of monitors and an interval allowed by your plan, and the schedule runs indefinitely. Changing an interval within what your plan permits costs nothing extra, which means the interval can be chosen on merit rather than on budget. That is the model we use, and it is the main reason we mention it here.
A practical consequence worth knowing: on metered pricing, the cheapest monitoring configuration is usually also the least useful one. Check what your tool charges for the frequency you actually want, not the one in the headline plan.
Past a point, frequency buys you false alarms rather than awareness.
Networks drop packets. A single check failing is not the same as a site being down, and the more often you check the more single failures you generate. A tool that alerts on the first failure at 30-second intervals will page you for things that resolved themselves before you read the message.
A five-minute check that confirms a failure before alerting is more useful than a 30-second check that does not. Confirmation can mean re-checking, or better, checking from a second location — a genuine outage fails everywhere, a routing problem fails from one place.
Trust in monitoring is spent once. A team that has learned to ignore the alerts will ignore the real one, and no interval setting fixes that afterwards. Slower and believed beats faster and dismissed.
If it takes twenty minutes to respond, page someone and start a fix, the difference between one-minute and five-minute detection is four minutes on a twenty-five minute incident. Worth having, not worth reorganising your budget for.
Not everything deserves the same frequency, and mixing them is normal.
Checkout, payment callbacks, login, the API your mobile app depends on. Downtime here has a per-minute cost you can usually calculate, which makes the case for faster checking straightforward.
Homepage, key landing pages, the app itself. Fast enough that you will know before most customers do, slow enough that transient blips do not dominate.
Docs, blog, status-adjacent tooling, internal dashboards. Knowing within a quarter of an hour is genuinely fine.
These are dates, not states. Checking a certificate every minute tells you nothing a daily check would not, and the warning window is what actually matters.
Pick a check frequency based on what downtime costs you.
For a checkout path this is arithmetic. For a blog it is close to nothing. That number decides everything else.
Anywhere money moves or users authenticate.
The default that suits most pages, most of the time.
Confirmation matters more than raw frequency. A re-check, or better a second location, prevents most false alarms.
They are dates. The warning window does the work, not the check frequency.
Typically about 5 minutes from start to finish.
Uptime monitors, watched pages and heartbeats each get their own allowance, so adding a page watch never costs you a monitor. SSL and domain checks ride along with the monitor they belong to and use nothing extra.
| Plan | Monitors | Watched pages | Heartbeats | Fastest interval | Alert channels | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | 1 | 1 | Every 30 minutes | 1 email address | $0 |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | 25 | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | 10 | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | 50 | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | 100 | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
Five minutes for most sites, one minute for checkout, login and payment paths. Slower than fifteen minutes stops being monitoring in any useful sense.
On revenue paths, usually yes — the difference between one and five minutes is four minutes of undetected downtime, and on a checkout page that has a number attached. On a marketing site it rarely justifies the cost.
About 43,200 for a single URL. At five minutes it is about 8,640. If your tool meters check runs, that difference is the whole of your bill.
It generates more single-check failures, which become false alarms if your tool alerts on the first failure. What prevents that is confirmation — re-checking, or checking from a second location — not a slower interval.
Daily is ample. A certificate expiry is a fixed date, so frequent checking adds nothing. What matters is the warning window — how far ahead you are told.
Some tools reach 15 or 30 seconds. Our floor is 60 seconds on the Pro plan and five minutes on the entry plan. Below about 30 seconds, false positives usually grow faster than the awareness you gain.
No, and mixing is normal. Put revenue paths on one minute, the main site on five and supporting systems on fifteen. Uniform intervals usually mean either overpaying or under-monitoring something.
Negligibly at these rates. One request a minute is nothing next to real traffic. The cost is in your monitoring bill, not your server load.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Nothing metered — five-minute checks on 25 monitors from $5 a month, 60-second checks on Pro.