Why an outside opinion settles it
When a site fails to load, the first question is whether the problem is the server or the path between you and it. A stale DNS cache, an ISP route, a VPN, an extension, or a captive portal all produce exactly the same blank page as a genuinely dead origin.
Requesting the page from somewhere that shares none of your local state answers that in one step. If we get a 200 back, the server is fine and the problem is on your side. If we get a 502 or a timeout, it isn’t you.
What “down” actually looks like
Genuine outages are rarely a clean connection refused. Far more often the origin is up and something in front of it is broken: a 502 from a proxy whose upstream died, a 503 while an overloaded app server sheds requests, a 500 from a bad deploy, or a request that connects and then hangs until it times out.
An expired certificate is its own category. The server answers perfectly, but every browser refuses to render the response — so the site is functionally down for every visitor while every naive uptime check still reports it as healthy. This checker reports the certificate state alongside the status code for exactly that reason.
An expired certificate is the cruellest outage: the server answers perfectly, so naive uptime checks stay green while every real visitor is blocked at the door.
How Zeqo Watch works for you
Checking by hand only works when you already suspect something. The outages that cost you a client are the ones that start at 2am on a Sunday and are still running when they open their laptop on Monday.
Zeqo Watch checks every site you manage on a schedule, opens an incident the moment one stops answering, and alerts you by email, Slack or webhook — with the status code and response time attached, so you know whether you are looking at a bad deploy or a dead host before you open a terminal.
You can also publish a status page per client, which turns “is the site down?” emails into a link they can check themselves.