The dataset: between August 2025 and July 2026, ViewPeek's monitoring agents ran 4,337,525 HTTP uptime checks, 1,096,728 pings, and 15,177 SSL certificate checks against 21 production monitors — a mix of our own portfolio and customer targets, reported here only in aggregate. One honesty note before the findings: the dataset has a gap in March–April 2026, when the monitoring infrastructure itself was being migrated. We're publishing what the data shows, including the parts that flatter nobody. Download the aggregate dataset as CSV.
Finding 1 — Uptime is a barbell, and averages lie
The single most striking pattern: no monitor in the entire dataset lived between 1% and 99% uptime. Every target was either alive — 17 of 21 monitors at 99.4% or better, most at 99.97%+ — or effectively dead, with four monitors at exactly 0% (abandoned domains, DNS that no longer resolves, infrastructure that was simply switched off while its monitor kept checking).
That makes "average website uptime" a nearly meaningless number. Our fleet-wide mean is 99.28%, but that figure describes nothing real: it's three-nines sites blended with corpses. The median monitor recorded 99.995%. If you're benchmarking your own site, compare against the median of living sites — and treat any sustained dip below 99% not as degradation but as a sign something is structurally wrong (billing lapse, expired domain, decommissioned box) rather than a flaky app.
Finding 2 — "Down" almost never means "crashed"
Folklore says downtime looks like an error page. The data says otherwise. Of the 31,328 failed checks:
| Failure class | Share | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Connection / DNS failure | 83.4% | Host unreachable, DNS not resolving, connection refused |
| HTTP 5xx | 7.7% | The server answered — with an error (the classic "crash") |
| HTTP 401 / 403 | 7.7% | The site blocked its own monitor (auth, WAF, geo-blocking) |
| Other 4xx | 0.7% | Mostly misconfigured monitor targets |
| Timeouts | <0.1% | Vanishingly rare — 27 checks out of 4.3 million |
Five out of six failures happen before your application code runs at all. The practical consequence: monitoring only your app's health endpoint misses most of what actually takes sites offline. Reachability, DNS, and certificate validity are where the real risk lives. The 401/403 slice carries its own lesson — a meaningful share of "downtime" was sites accidentally blocking their own monitoring, which is worth checking before you trust a red dashboard.
Finding 3 — Healthy sites are fast, and consistently so
For successful checks, the response-time distribution was tight: median 21 ms, 95th percentile 243 ms, 99th percentile 447 ms (EU agents checking predominantly EU-hosted targets — your geography will shift the absolute numbers, not the shape). The distribution barely moved by hour of day: the median was 21 ms at 3 a.m. and 21 ms at 3 p.m. Modern hosting doesn't have a rush hour at this scale; if your site's response time swings with the clock, that's a capacity signal worth investigating, not normal weather.
Finding 4 — SSL automation works, with a tail
Every certificate in the dataset — across 15,177 checks — was an automated Let's Encrypt certificate. Renewal automation kept most observed certificates in the comfortable 30–90-days-remaining band. But automation is not a guarantee: we observed one certificate reach 0 days remaining — checked on the very day it expired. Renewal cron jobs fail silently; the certificate does not. That tail case is exactly why ViewPeek sends daily expiry warnings throughout a certificate's final 30 days, even when "renewal is automated".
Methodology & caveats
- Window: 2025-08-15 → 2026-07-19, with a March–April 2026 gap (monitoring infra migration). Monthly volumes otherwise ~480–500k checks.
- 21 HTTP monitors at 1–60-minute intervals; results aggregated, no customer targets identified.
- Failure classes derived from stored error messages and HTTP statuses; "connection/DNS" includes dial, resolution and TLS-connect failures.
- Response-time percentiles computed over successful checks only.
- This data is citable — link to this page. We'll re-run the numbers periodically as the fleet grows.
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