How monitoring works: checks, scans, and your score

UptimeVitals runs two kinds of monitoring on every site: quick uptime checks, and a slower full health scan. They answer different questions, so they run on different schedules.

Uptime checks

An uptime check asks one question: is the site answering? Intervals depend on your plan — daily on Free, every 5 minutes on Starter, every minute on Pro and Agency. A site is only reported down after two consecutive checks fail. One failed check on its own never opens an incident, because a single blip is usually the network, not your site.

Full scans

A full scan checks everything else: uptime, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, the SSL certificate, blacklist listings, a snapshot of your DNS records, and your domain expiry date. Free plans scan every 24 hours; paid plans every 12 hours. Each scan is stored, so your site's history shows when something changed — and what it changed from.

The 100-point score

Every scan produces a score out of 100: uptime 20, SPF 20, DMARC 20, SSL 15, DKIM 15, blacklist 10. The weighting is deliberate — email authentication (SPF + DKIM + DMARC = 55 points) is where small sites silently bleed, because a broken record sends your mail to spam without any visible error on your website.

What the statuses mean

OK means the check passed. Warn means something needs attention but is not broken — an SSL certificate expiring in three weeks, for example. Fail means something is broken now, like a missing DKIM record. Down means the site is not answering at all.

Blocked is a special case: the site answered with HTTP 401 or 403, which usually means a firewall (often Cloudflare) declined our checker rather than your site being down. A blocked result counts as reachable, scores 12 of 20 for uptime, and never opens a down incident — we would rather tell you we could not get through than cry wolf about an outage that is not one.

Alerts vs the score

The score is a snapshot; alerts are for changes. You are emailed when a site goes down, comes back up, when DNS changes, when any check gets worse, and when SSL or domain expiry approaches (30 days for SSL, 14 days for a domain). Routine good scans do not email you — only changes and the Monday digest do.