You don't need an enterprise observability stack to know when something's wrong. A lightweight setup that covers most of what a solo site owner actually needs:
- Free uptime checker pinging your site every few minutes with email/SMS alerts.
- Basic server-level monitoring for CPU/RAM/disk - many control panels already include this, just make sure alerts are actually turned on.
- Log rotation + a quick way to grep errors so a slow leak of PHP/application errors doesn't go unnoticed for weeks.
- SSL expiry monitoring. An expired cert taking a site down overnight is one of the most avoidable outages there is.