Your complete guide to website monitoring made simple. Uptime Kuma is the open-source monitoring tool UK businesses use to watch websites, APIs, servers and databases around the clock — and SmartXHosting’s managed hosting puts a working instance in your hands in minutes.
What Uptime Kuma is • SmartXHosting managed hosting • Accessing your instance • Dashboard overview • Understanding uptime percentages • What you can monitor • Quick first-steps checklist • FAQ
Uptime Kuma is a free, open-source, self-hosted monitoring tool that has earned more than 84,000 stars on GitHub — making it one of the most popular monitoring projects in the world. Originally built as a lightweight alternative to commercial services such as UptimeRobot and Pingdom, it offers an impressive feature set without any recurring licence fees.
Out of the box, Uptime Kuma supports over 16 monitor types for checking websites, APIs, servers, databases, DNS records and more. It also ships with more than 90 notification channels — from email and Slack to Telegram, Discord, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty and webhooks — so you are always alerted the moment something goes wrong. On top of that, you get unlimited, fully customisable status pages to keep your customers informed about service availability.
While Uptime Kuma is traditionally self-hosted on your own server using Docker, SmartXHosting Uptime Kuma Hosting removes all the complexity. For just £1 per month, you get a fully managed Uptime Kuma instance that is ready to use within minutes — no Docker, no server configuration, no command line.
What’s included in the plan:
After purchasing the Uptime Kuma Hosting plan from the Web Apps product page, you will receive a welcome email containing your free uptimekuma.io subdomain and initial login credentials.
https://your-subdomain.uptimekuma.io in any modern web browser.Tip: you can also access your Uptime Kuma instance through the SmartXHosting Customer Dashboard. Sign in, navigate to Services, select your Uptime Kuma service, and click the access link.
Once logged in, you land on the main dashboard — the central hub for all your monitoring activity:
Clicking any monitor opens its detail page, which includes a response time chart, uptime percentages, an event log and — for HTTPS monitors — SSL certificate information.
Uptime Kuma automatically calculates and displays uptime percentages across several time ranges. The numbers represent the proportion of successful checks out of all checks performed during the period:
For example, an uptime of 99.950% over 30 days means approximately 21 minutes of total downtime during that month. The percentages are calculated to three decimal places, and any heartbeats that fall within a scheduled maintenance window are excluded so planned work does not penalise your statistics.
The response time graph on each monitor’s detail page provides a visual timeline of how quickly your service responds. Switch between 24-hour, 7-day and 30-day views to spot performance trends at different scales.
Uptime Kuma supports a wide range of monitor types, making it suitable for far more than simple website checks:
Good to know: with the SmartXHosting managed plan, all of these monitor types are available at no extra cost. The only types not applicable are Docker Container and Remote Browser monitors, which require direct server access that SmartXHosting manages on your behalf.
Follow these four steps to get your monitoring up and running in under ten minutes:
Tip: need to monitor a WordPress site or an online shop? Simply create an HTTP(s) monitor with the site’s URL. Uptime Kuma will check it at your chosen interval and alert you the instant it goes down.
Monitor your websites for just £1/month
SmartXHosting Uptime Kuma Hosting gives you unlimited monitors, unlimited dashboards, a free uptimekuma.io subdomain, daily backups and free SSL. No server setup required — start monitoring in minutes.
View Uptime Kuma HostingQ: What is Uptime Kuma and why should I use it?
A: Uptime Kuma is a free, open-source monitoring tool with 84,000+ GitHub stars. It supports 16+ monitor types, 90+ notification channels and unlimited status pages, letting you track websites, APIs and servers around the clock.
Q: How much does Uptime Kuma cost on SmartXHosting?
A: SmartXHosting Uptime Kuma Hosting costs £1 per month with unlimited monitors, unlimited dashboards, daily backups, free SSL and a free uptimekuma.io subdomain. No Docker or server setup needed.
Q: How do I access my Uptime Kuma instance?
A: After purchasing the plan you receive a free uptimekuma.io subdomain. Visit https://your-subdomain.uptimekuma.io in your browser and sign in with the credentials provided in your welcome email.
Q: What can I monitor with Uptime Kuma?
A: Websites (HTTP/HTTPS), servers (TCP/Ping), DNS records, APIs, cron jobs via Push monitors, databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) and SSL certificate expiry dates.
Q: Do I need technical knowledge to use Uptime Kuma on SmartXHosting?
A: No. SmartXHosting manages all server infrastructure, updates and backups. You only use the web dashboard to add monitors, configure notifications and create status pages — no command line needed.
Q: How often does Uptime Kuma check my websites?
A: The default heartbeat interval is 60 seconds, configurable per monitor between 20 seconds and several hours. Shorter intervals catch outages faster but generate more check traffic.
Q: Can I share a status page publicly?
A: Yes. Each status page gets a public URL you can share with customers, or configure private access via password. Multiple status pages per instance are supported.