Your Clients Don't Care About Uptime (Until It's Down)

The Client Call You Don't Want

"Hey, the website is down. How long has this been happening? My customers are complaining."

This call destroys trust. Not because the site went down—things break. But because the client found out before you did.

The Psychology of Client Trust

Clients don't expect perfection. They expect competence. Competence means:

• You know what's happening with their project
• You tell them before they discover issues
• You have a plan when things go wrong

Reactive = amateur. Proactive = professional.

Turning Monitoring Into a Service

What if instead of waiting for angry calls, you sent this email:

"Quick update on your project this month:

- Uptime: 99.97% (12 minutes total downtime, resolved immediately)

- Performance: Score improved from 74 to 82

- Security: All dependencies up to date

- SSL: Certificate valid for 287 more days

> Everything's running smoothly. Let me know if you have questions."

This email takes 2 minutes to write with the right data. It provides:

• Evidence you're monitoring
• Proof of value
• Reason to keep paying you

The Monthly Health Report

Here's a template that works:

Project Health Summary - [Month]

Overall Status: Healthy (or "Needs Attention")

Uptime: XX.XX%

• Any incidents and resolution times

Performance:

• Current score: XX/100
• Trend: Improving/Stable/Needs work

Security:

• Dependencies: X total, X outdated, X vulnerabilities
• SSL expires: [Date]

Recommendations:

• [One or two actionable items]

Next Steps:

• [What you're doing proactively]

How to Gather This Data

Manual Approach (30+ min/client/month)

• Check uptime tool
• Run PageSpeed test
• Check GitHub for alerts
• Review SSL certificate
• Compile into report

Automated Approach (5 min/client/month)

• SlyDuck dashboard shows all metrics
• Export to PDF or copy data
• Paste into template
• Send

The time savings matter when you have 5, 10, 20 clients.

Pricing This Service

Some freelancers include monitoring in their hosting/maintenance packages. Others charge separately:

Included approach:

• "Hosting + maintenance: $X/month, includes uptime monitoring and monthly reports"

Separate approach:

• "Add-on: Proactive monitoring + monthly health reports: $25-50/month"

Either way, the actual cost is minimal if you're using efficient tools.

The Upsell Opportunity

Health reports create natural upsell moments:

"Your site's performance score dropped to 61 this month. The main issue is unoptimized images. I can fix this for [price] and we should see scores back in the 80s."

The client sees the problem in black and white. You're not inventing work—you're solving a documented issue.

Real Talk: Most Freelancers Don't Do This

Which is exactly why you should. When a client compares you to another developer:

Developer A: "I built the site, let me know if something breaks."

Developer B: "I built the site, and I monitor it continuously. Here's last month's health report. Everything's green, but I noticed your SSL expires in 60 days—I'll handle the renewal."

Developer B keeps the client. Developer B gets referrals.

Getting Started

• Add client projects to SlyDuck (first one free)
• Set up the monitoring (5 minutes per project)
• At month end, pull the data
• Send the report

First month, it feels like extra work. By month three, it's just what you do. By month six, clients mention it when recommending you.

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SlyDuck makes client reporting effortless. Start monitoring your client projects.