Uptime.com Blog

Website Checks vs. Probe Servers: What’s the Difference?

There are different components that go into checking to ensure your website is working, but as soon as your website stops responding, Uptime.com notifies you through a variety of methods so you can take immediate action. Website downtime is extremely expensive, even in the middle of the night, so ensuring the site is always up, or at least up as much as possible, requires special tools.

Uptime.com looks at three different things to determine the immediate success of your website. They are checks, probe servers and servers. But what exactly does each of these mean?

Checks

A check is simply what is sounds like, a look at your website to make sure it’s working. Checks are important because they provide valuable data about your website, including an assessment to determine if it’s running as planned. Checks are done on a regular basis and from a variety of locations around the world, so website owners know the second something is wrong with their site. With downtime being so costly, these routine checks are an important part of the Uptime.com process.

Probe Servers

These are the actual pieces of technology that run the checks. Probe servers send out requests to websites to make sure they are working as expected. They record the data that the website takes and keeps it available and includes things like website response time to determine if your website is working as expected, or if there is a problem. This data can also be used to predict future problems, such as daily traffic increases that could hurt performance.

Servers

Servers are what keep your website up and running. You either have them at your business or, more likely, outsource their use to a website provider. If the servers fail to work, then your website goes down. This could be caused by too much traffic for them to handle, an error that confuses their processing, or a physical event, such as the area where they are housed becoming too hot, causing the servers to stop working.

As you can see, there are a lot of different factors that go into monitoring your website.

Michael Esposito