One of the features of the Jetpack plugin for WordPress is that it will ping your site every 5 minutes and alert you by email any time that Automattic (the company that runs the Jetpack plugin as well as WordPress.com paid hosting) senses an issue. On one hand this can be very convenient, however more recently Reclaim Hosting has noticed a large amount of false positives that can indicate severe issues with a site when in reality when checked the site is online and functioning. Here are some tips from Reclaim Hosting to ensure your site is working properly:
- Always check against the emails to ensure that when it says it’s down that it’s actually down. The site could have an SSL certificate error, it could be running slow due to plugin conflicts, or it could be a host of other issues (or none at all and just be a false positive).
- Consider a different monitoring tool. We like Uptime Robot and use it for monitoring on all of our servers. Not only is it more accurate, but you can be selective about how often it checks the site, how it checks, and how it alerts you. For example at Reclaim Hosting we monitor servers based on keyword checks on an example basic WordPress install and if it fails more than 2 times in a 5 minute period we are alerted.
- Disable the emails and keep an eye on Reclaim Hosting’s public status page. While we definitely recommend keeping tabs on your own website, for notices of any server level issues the best place to know would be our status page where you can also subscribe to the server your site is hosted on and get alerts when there are known issues.
When in doubt feel free to open a support ticket, but be aware that while we are happy to troubleshoot or confirm any known server issues, we cannot troubleshoot issues with third party plugins or historical emails from Jetpack that more than likely are false positives if they don’t match up with our own monitoring.