Blog

Plain answers on uptime, email health and the servers behind your site

Short explainers written to be useful whether or not you use UpConduit. Dated, and kept current.

What is a good time to first byte?

TTFB explained in plain English: what the number includes, what Google considers good, why it varies by visitor location, and what actually moves it.

3 September 2026 · 5 min read

How to monitor SPF, DKIM and DMARC (and why valid is not the same as unchanged)

A practical guide to keeping email authentication healthy: what each record does, the failure modes that quietly break deliverability, and why you need to watch for changes, not just validity.

3 September 2026 · 7 min read

How to silence uptime alerts during a deploy (without missing a real outage)

Maintenance windows done properly: open one from your pipeline before a release, let it close itself, and still get paged if the deploy leaves something broken.

3 September 2026 · 4 min read

Monitoring SSH, databases and Redis without installing an agent

How to watch the servers behind your website — SSH, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, IMAP — from outside, why the service banner matters, and the one alert almost nobody has.

3 September 2026 · 5 min read

What 99.9% uptime actually means (in minutes)

The uptime percentages people promise, translated into minutes of downtime — and why the check interval you monitor with decides whether you can even claim the number.

3 September 2026 · 4 min read