If you run a web app or a client site on your own, you are the on-call rota. When something breaks at 2am, the email lands in your inbox and you are the one who reads it. That is fine, as long as you have set things up so the message is worth waking for and you can actually sleep afterwards.
This is a practical plan for doing that. It does not require a team, a spreadsheet of shifts or a new tool. It requires some decisions you make once and then review.
Be honest about what you can cover
Start by writing down what you can realistically respond to. A solo developer cannot fix a payment provider outage at 3am, and pretending otherwise leads to alerts that are ignored after a week.
For each site or service, answer three questions:
- Can I fix this myself, today, without help?
- Does a delay of six hours cause real damage to a customer?
- Do I have access to the server, host or dashboard I would need?
If the answer to the first question is no, the alert is information, not an emergency. Treat it that way. If you do not have access at night, say so to your client in writing and agree what they can expect.
AperioFlow's free plan includes 10 monitors, which is enough to cover a handful of sites while you work this out. Monitors you do not need can be removed later.
Decide which alerts deserve a night-time message
Most on-call pain comes from alerts that are technically correct and practically useless. A single slow response is not an outage. A certificate that expires in 20 days is not an incident.
Reserve night-time messages for a short list. A reasonable starting list for a small site looks like this:
- The homepage or login page is down, confirmed from more than one check.
- A checkout, booking or sign-up flow is failing.
- A nightly backup has not run when it should have.
- An error rate has jumped well above its normal level.
Everything else waits. Put these on the list, write the threshold next to each one, and be specific. 'Site slow' is not a threshold. 'Response over 5 seconds for 5 minutes in a row' is.
Alert emails in AperioFlow go only to people in your organisation, so the list you set is the list that reaches you. Keep it short enough that you would be glad to get every message on it.
Group the rest into a morning check
The alerts that did not make the night list still matter. They just do not need you at 2am. Send them to a morning routine instead.
Open your monitors and status page at the same time each day, before anything else. Look for three things: anything that went down overnight and recovered, anything that has been degraded for a long time, and anything you have not looked at before. Write down the ones that need action and do them before the day's own work starts.
This works because it turns a stream of interruptions into one scheduled task. You are no longer deciding every time whether a message is important. You decided that already, and you check again in the morning.
If you work with clients, the same check gives you something to report. A short note such as 'Your site had two brief slowdowns overnight, both recovered, nothing needed changing' builds more trust than silence.
Write a one-page first-steps note for yourself
When an alert fires, your judgement is at its weakest. You are tired, you have just woken up and you may not remember how the site is put together. A one-page note fixes that.
Keep it short and keep it where you will find it. For each site, include:
- What the site does and who uses it.
- The first three things to check, in order.
- Where the hosting, database and DNS settings live.
- Who to contact if you cannot fix it, and what you will tell them.
- How to put a holding message on your status page.
The last point matters. A status page that says 'We are looking into an issue with logins and will update within the hour' stops your customers writing to you while you work. The steps for writing that update are covered in our post on what to put in an incident update.
Update the note after every incident. If something took you twenty minutes to find, add the step that would have saved those twenty minutes.
Use a heartbeat to confirm routine jobs ran
Some of the worst failures do not look like outages. A nightly backup stops running. A cron job that sends invoices quietly fails. The site stays up, so no uptime check complains, and you find out a month later.
A heartbeat monitor covers this gap. Your job pings AperioFlow when it finishes. If the ping does not arrive within the window you set, you get an alert. You are not checking that the site is reachable. You are checking that work which should happen has happened.
Use heartbeats for:
- Backups, which should report success and not just run.
- Scheduled jobs such as invoice runs, report emails or data syncs.
- Any task where silence means failure.
Set the window a little longer than the job normally takes, so a slightly slow run does not wake you. Heartbeat alerts belong on the night list only if the missed job would cause damage before morning.
Review noisy alerts every Friday and delete or retune them
No set of alerts stays right on its own. Sites change, traffic grows, hosts get slower. An alert that was useful in March can be noise by June.
Set aside 20 minutes each Friday. Go through the alerts that fired that week and sort each one into one of three piles:
- It was real and I acted on it. Keep it as it is.
- It was real but not urgent. Move it to the morning check.
- It fired and I did nothing. Retune the threshold or delete it.
The third pile is the one that matters most. Every alert you ignore teaches you to ignore the next one. If you cannot remember the last time you acted on a particular alert, it does not belong on your night list.
Keep a note of what you changed and why. In three months you will want to know why you stopped being woken up by a slow response on a page nobody visits at night.
Set up alerts you can trust
On-call as a solo developer works when the alerts are few, specific and believable. You decide what wakes you, you check the rest in the morning, you write down what to do before you are tired, and you prune the list every week. None of that needs more hours. It needs fewer, better messages.
If you want to try this on your own sites, you can start free at https://app.aperioflow.co.uk/#/signup. The free plan includes 10 monitors, and the team plan is 29 pounds a month flat for up to 10 people, as shown on the pricing page. Hosted in France. Run from the UK. You can download your data at any time.