(Entry was posted by Neil Cheesma on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 01/20/2017).

Server load times and hosting uptime

Apart from something like pingdom which seems very expensive for an individual to use.. is there a way to check server load times and hosting uptime over say a week or two?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Neil Cheesman: yes... I find that to be very useful...
Jim Munro: If uptime is your priority, I don`t think Paessler`s PRTG should be forgotten. There is a freeware version that allows you to monitor up to about 30 sites, I think. It`s bulletproof and constantly updated. https://www.paessler.com/prtg
Alan Bleiweiss: Here`s a sampling from WPT`s "Details" report (you have to scroll down past the visual charts to get to this layout on that report)
Alan Bleiweiss: And for individual audits, I run a sampling of individual pages using WebPageTest.org (Free), experimenting with server location, and DSL as well as Mobile 3G emulators, as those give the best mid-range connection types for most real world users. That test breaks down speeds for all critical data points, and the "details" report shows a line item list of all individual page elements with their multiple speed process times (Connection time, DNS Lookup, First Byte (server start point), Total download (overall server performance), and more.
Alan Bleiweiss: Hmmm... I don`t do any kind of ongoing speed data tracking. Google Search Console, under "Crawl" / "Crawl Stats", has an "average download times" report I check with every audit I do - the amount of time it takes their system to download the code for individual pages (the 1st step in speed processes). That data point needs to be no more than a few hundred milliseconds - anything slower indicates slow server processing issues. And when that number hits 2 seconds, it`s a red flag where Google is designed to abandon the crawl when it`s slower than that, for any individual crawl.
Neil Cheesman: Thanks.. how does that compare with gtmetrix? in terms of the tool itself and reports it offers