What we learned watching 287 client websites
MonitoraWeb was born inside an agency. These are the real numbers from our portfolio, the half that was dead without anyone knowing, and the rules we set so we stop paying for alerts about sites that no longer exist.
MonitoraWeb is made by Monstruo Creativo, an agency in Lima, Peru. Before selling it to anyone, we used it with our own clients: every site we build or maintain goes into MonitoraWeb automatically from the agency's management system.
This is what we saw when we took a calm look at the portfolio. The numbers come straight from our account, on 25 October 2026.
The snapshot
| Sites | |
|---|---|
| Monitored and up | 137 |
| Monitored and down at that moment | 8 |
| Paused | 142 |
| Total | 287 |
Plus 151 status pages, one per client or project.
The number that surprised us most is not the outages. It is the pauses: almost half the portfolio.
Half of it was dead
When we went through those sites one by one, we found this:
- 61 sites had no DNS on any public server. The domain had been lost or not renewed. They were not down: they no longer existed.
- 140 had been paused for more than 30 days. Someone paused them at some point and there they stayed.
Nobody had removed them because removing them was nobody's job. The client left, the project ended or the domain expired, and the site stayed on the list.
This happens to any agency with a few years of clients. And it has two costs:
- Money. Every WhatsApp alert costs something. A daily alert about a dead site is money thrown away every day.
- Attention. If the alert list is full of sites nobody cares about, the alert for the site that does matter gets lost among them.
The rules we set
Instead of cleaning up by hand once and waiting for it to fill up again, we turned it into rules that run on their own:
- A paused site does not send outage alerts. For 30 days it stays on the lists, for domain alerts only. After that it drops off on its own, unless its domain is about to expire, has expired or has lost its DNS.
- Expired domain: four alerts, at 7, 14, 21 and 30 days. Meanwhile outage, certificate and change alerts are silenced, since they would say the same thing another way.
- Lost domain: if it still has no DNS when those alerts end, the monitor pauses itself. Every week we check whether the DNS came back and, if it did, it resumes.
- Site that does not load but whose domain is alive: paused at 30 days, checked quietly every 15 days and left alone at 60.
- .pe domains, which do not publish an expiry date: if the site fails to load three days in a row and has no DNS, it is treated as expired.
Only what the system paused resumes on its own. If someone on the team paused a site by hand, it stays as they left it.
One status page per client
The 151 pages are not for show. Each client sees their sites, with their brand and on their own domain if they want, without seeing anything from the rest of the portfolio.
When a client asks "is my site down?", the answer is a link, not a manual check. And each monitor can alert its own destinations: the alert for a client's site can go to that client.
WhatsApp, with a cap
WhatsApp is the most-read channel and the only one that costs per message. At the rates Meta charges us in Peruvian soles, a utility alert costs about S/ 0.10 (around US$0.03) and a marketing one about S/ 0.23. Little per message; a lot when multiplied by 287 sites and every blip.
So WhatsApp has its own rules:
- Outages are only sent if they last 15 minutes (30 if the server does not respond at all).
- They are grouped in one message, two a day at most.
- Everything else goes into a Monday summary. If nothing is new, we do not write.
What we would do from day one
If we started the portfolio from scratch today:
- Every site with an owner at the agency and a contact at the client.
- Every domain with its expiry date and who pays for it written down somewhere shared.
- One status page per client from day one, so nobody needs to ask.
- A quarterly review of the portfolio to remove what is no longer ours.
- Alerts that do not shout about everything: confirmation before alerting, and WhatsApp only for what truly cannot wait.
What is not automated gets forgotten. And what gets forgotten in a client portfolio ends up costing money, or a client.
Sources
- Monstruo Creativo S.A.C.'s MonitoraWeb account: monitors, status pages and DNS check, queried on 25 October 2026.
- Per-message rates: what Meta bills us in soles for our WhatsApp Business account, October 2026.
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