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Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

yourserverisdown.com

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Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#31

Post by jedberg »

SantiagoVargas wrote: post #13
vivzkestrel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok how does it actually work. i get it you ll check for 500 errors by hitting multiple endpoints every x units of time. But the number of endpoints you must check also keeps going up for your service. Today you start and have 10 endpoints,6 months down the line you need to check 10000 endpoints every x units of time. How do you manage scaling this?

Right, we ping the servers every minute. Since we charge a one-time fee the credits expire after a year, but the service is scaleable. To answer your question I'll give you some more context: The architecture uses scalable AWS serverless components (Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB) and is well-suited to handle a large increase in monitored endpoints. The primary scaling mechanism is the automatic concurrency scaling of the Lam…

So if one hosts one's site on AWS, then your system probably isn't going to work, eh? :)

If AWS goes down, your site and mine both go down together. This was basically why Pagerduty got out to an early win -- they never used AWS when everyone else did.

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#32

Post by jjtang1 »

jedberg wrote: post #31
SantiagoVargas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, we ping the servers every minute. Since we charge a one-time fee the credits expire after a year, but the service is scaleable. To answer your question I'll give you some more context: The architecture uses scalable AWS serverless components (Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB) and is well-suited to handle a large increase in monitored endpoints. The primary scaling mechanism is the automatic concurrency scaling of the Lam…

So if one hosts one's site on AWS, then your system probably isn't going to work, eh? :) If AWS goes down, your site and mine both go down together. This was basically why Pagerduty got out to an early win -- they never used AWS when everyone else did.

Where you host is underrated. When I started building on-call for Rootly the first thing we did was build a multi-cloud setup (AWS and GCP) for honestly pretty overkill reliability. Don’t regret it one bit.

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#33

Post by pyfon »

RandomUser4976 wrote: post #21

My young child has Type 1 diabetes. I need to know when the server that receives glucose readings from his CGM on his body goes down. It’s a huge help to prevent emergencies and death when I know when his blood glucose is low AND when there’s no new blood glucose readings. I’m going to try this service. Thank you for sharing!

It is crazy you need a seperate service for this :(. Why doesn't the original service treat no data as an alert as well as have a 99.999 slo?

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#34

Post by pyfon »

bitbasher wrote: post #4

First and foremost, I love a good side hustle. With that being said, I find these kinds notifications to provide more false positives than correctly detecting downtime. That ends up costing more time checking/double checking. On the other hand, if you are running a service with no users and you have downtime... did you really have downtime? If you run a service and you have downtime and no one reports it, did you hav…

Oof! I'd rather be half way through fixing the problem while the customer first discovers it.

Unless you have 1 customer who lives in the same time zone or something.

I'd understand not wanring to be being woken up from a page for a small operation though.

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#35

Post by SantiagoVargas »

jedberg wrote: post #31
SantiagoVargas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, we ping the servers every minute. Since we charge a one-time fee the credits expire after a year, but the service is scaleable. To answer your question I'll give you some more context: The architecture uses scalable AWS serverless components (Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB) and is well-suited to handle a large increase in monitored endpoints. The primary scaling mechanism is the automatic concurrency scaling of the Lam…

So if one hosts one's site on AWS, then your system probably isn't going to work, eh? :) If AWS goes down, your site and mine both go down together. This was basically why Pagerduty got out to an early win -- they never used AWS when everyone else did.

Haha not quite! We host our main startup (Website + app) on AWS and have been using it for around 7 months internally, it's worked great for us so far.

But if something crazy like the 2023 outage happens again then you're absolutely right. Though you'd likely get a news alert for it - our fallback :)

If we get enough traction we'll look into a multi-cloud setup to mitigate that risk. For now our goal is to help with notifying you when your server goes down due to more common reasons.

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#37

Post by SantiagoVargas »

jjtang1 wrote: post #32
jedberg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if one hosts one's site on AWS, then your system probably isn't going to work, eh? :) If AWS goes down, your site and mine both go down together. This was basically why Pagerduty got out to an early win -- they never used AWS when everyone else did.

Where you host is underrated. When I started building on-call for Rootly the first thing we did was build a multi-cloud setup (AWS and GCP) for honestly pretty overkill reliability. Don’t regret it one bit.

Just looked into Rootly - looks great. This was an mvp launch to test the concept but I'll see about building the multi-cloud setup. Nice to see another Western alum here.

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#38

Post by SantiagoVargas »

bguebert wrote: post #36

This is cool. I did something similar at my work using smokeping and the #@vtext.com to send the texts. https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/

Thanks. It's simple but seems to be a common need. One of those tools many companies end up having to build but keep internal.

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#39

Post by thinkingemote »

SantiagoVargas wrote: post #30
thinkingemote wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting, how did you come up with the pricing? Similar other services?

Not quite - just thought of what I would actually pay for it. Looked at others and saw most done for you solutions were monthly subscriptions ~$9. Couldn't see myself being excited by that pricing model + another dashboard to manage, so I made it $5 for the year and built the most simple solution that's easy to set up and reliable (while not losing money). Almost all monitoring services I found target enterprise, and…

I used a hobby tier service which would send free emails but you would buy credits for SMS. Now I do it myself with simple Cron script

One thing with the events model is that for some webhosts which do maintenance or small periods of downtime often a user might see many through the year. Or in other words the hobby dev might see them but I imagine a production level small team shouldn't be using those servers anyway

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down

#40

Post by sam_goody »

I use uptimekuma (self hosted) and am very happy - it can text, or just about anything else - as long as you set it up.

Also Tianji[1], self-hosted in the same space.

Of course, these require setup and have to be hosted somewhere. Either another server or deployed to Heroku (Sealos, Render, etc), since they obviously cannot be deployed on the server you wish to monitor!

[1]: https://tianji.msgbyte.com/

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