# How to Monitor Ghost Uptime

> Ghost is a publishing platform for blogs, newsletters, and membership sites, available as managed Ghost(Pro) hosting or self-hosted on your own server, with native email newsletters and paid subscriptions.

*Source: https://monitoristic.com/monitor/ghost*

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## Why Monitor Ghost?

Whether you run Ghost(Pro) or self-host, your publication, its members area, and its paid subscriptions all depend on Ghost being online. Self-hosted Ghost can crash on its own — a stopped Node process, a database problem, or an expired SSL certificate. Ghost(Pro) can have platform incidents. If your site is down when a newsletter sends readers to a members-only post, you lose signups and look unreliable. Monitoring catches it before your readers do.

## What to Monitor

- `yourdomain.com` — Your Ghost site homepage
- `yourdomain.com/rss/` — Feed and content delivery — catches content API or rendering failures
- `yourdomain.com/members/` — Members portal — the paid-subscription flow that can fail on its own

## What You Should Actually Do

1. Monitor your live domain over HTTPS so an expired or misconfigured SSL certificate is caught immediately — a common silent failure for self-hosted Ghost
2. Add a monitor on the members or subscribe page — the paid-subscription flow can break while the blog itself loads
3. If you self-host, monitor an actual page (not just a ping) to catch crashed processes, full disks, and failed restarts
4. Time your checks tightly around newsletter sends, when a brief outage does the most damage
5. Track response times — a slow Ghost site often signals resource pressure on the server before it goes down entirely

## Ghost's Official Status Page

Ghost publishes real-time status at https://status.ghost.org. Your own monitor complements it by catching connection-level issues, often before the status page updates.

## Takeaway

Ghost gives you a beautiful publication and a real subscription business — but that business only works when the site is up. Self-hosted or on Ghost(Pro), the failures that hurt most (an expired cert, a crashed process, a broken members area) tend to happen quietly and at the worst time. External monitoring is what turns 'I found out Sunday' into 'I was alerted in 60 seconds'.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Does Ghost monitor my site's uptime?

Ghost(Pro) monitors its own platform, and self-hosted Ghost has no built-in uptime alerting at all. Neither sends you a notification when your specific site goes down — that requires external monitoring.

### Can a Ghost site go down?

Yes. Ghost(Pro) can have platform incidents, and self-hosted Ghost is exposed to crashed Node processes, database issues, full disks, failed deploys, and expired SSL certificates. Any of these can take your site, newsletter archive, and paid memberships offline.

### What should I monitor on a self-hosted Ghost install?

Monitor the live site over HTTPS so certificate and process failures are caught, and add the members or a key content page. Checking an actual rendered page — not just whether the server responds to a ping — confirms Ghost is really serving content.

### How is this different from status.ghost.org?

status.ghost.org reports Ghost(Pro) platform incidents. It says nothing about a self-hosted install, your specific server, your domain's SSL, or a partial failure that doesn't trip the platform status page. Your own monitor checks YOUR site directly.