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Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

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Re: Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

#11

Post by geerlingguy »

wbachnik wrote: post #9

What do you guys think is the best price/feature ratio for that kind of service? I can't find any detailed feature listing on the website, but it seems you can't offer much for ~$1 a month. Do you think 15 minute interval is enough? I assume the checks are made from one network location only (can't find details on the about page), would anyone be confident of the results with such setup? Is there any re-check in case…

Very good questions, and ones I had to think about quite a bit while building my MVP:

15 minute interval: I had to make sure the site was scalable in the beginning. My early testing data tells me that, for my target audience (as you say, probably not larger businesses at this point), 15 minutes is a good interval—it's better than most free services, but not so frequent as to incur extra expense on my end for bandwidth and database growth.

One location only: This is a compromise I have made for now—I have built the service in a way that I'll be able to add another node or two for the back-end checks once I get enough users. But for now, if the main server is down (hasn't happened yet, in four months of testing, but it will...), I only have a small bit of contingency, and don't have a hot backup.

Re-check for failure: Yes; if Server Check.in notices a site is down on more than 50% of node checks (once I have more than one node), it will check the site once more after a minute before sending a down notice.

API access: I don't have it yet, but I'm going to be building it (everything I've done on the site already has API data structures in place—I just don't have any of the interface or any kind of authentication system in place). I'm working on a mobile app that will be free for users, and will need the API up and running before I can launch it.

Re: Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

#12

Post by geerlingguy »

scottksmith95 wrote: post #10
geerlingguy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server Check.in will never have ads, and the privacy policy ( https://servercheck.in/privacy ) is pretty clear cut. The revenue comes from the users, so the service is 100% user-focused. I noticed their service when building Server Check.in, but didn't create an account for testing, so can't say anything with 100% certainty. However... - SMS is not free (unless they're using email-to-SMS gateways), so I'm not sure ho…

Thanks for your response and kudos to a very clean UI, powerful feature set, and low cost. You are correct, they are using email-to-SMS gateways.

Sure thing! I considered using email-to-SMS and lowering the cost to I do have to limit the SMS messages to 50/month (600/year) maximum at this point (see: https://servercheck.in/sms), until I can better track people's usage patterns and make sure I don't get hammered with larger fees than I'm taking in. That limit will hopefully be lifted at some point.

Re: Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

#13

Post by wbachnik »

geerlingguy wrote: post #11
wbachnik wrote: post #9

What do you guys think is the best price/feature ratio for that kind of service? I can't find any detailed feature listing on the website, but it seems you can't offer much for ~$1 a month. Do you think 15 minute interval is enough? I assume the checks are made from one network location only (can't find details on the about page), would anyone be confident of the results with such setup? Is there any re-check in case…

Very good questions, and ones I had to think about quite a bit while building my MVP: 15 minute interval: I had to make sure the site was scalable in the beginning. My early testing data tells me that, for my target audience (as you say, probably not larger businesses at this point), 15 minutes is a good interval—it's better than most free services, but not so frequent as to incur extra expense on my end for bandwidt…

Good to hear you have a plan :-)

From my experience, going from one to multiple monitoring nodes gets way more complicated than expected; make sure you have your timestamps across the nodes right, especially when you decide to go down with the interval to 1 minute or less.

Also, investing time in a testing setup where all scenarios can be tested paid off greatly. Having scripts covering all edge cases lets you sleep better when you have paying customers :-)

Good luck!

Re: Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

#14

Post by geerlingguy »

wbachnik wrote: post #13
geerlingguy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good questions, and ones I had to think about quite a bit while building my MVP: 15 minute interval: I had to make sure the site was scalable in the beginning. My early testing data tells me that, for my target audience (as you say, probably not larger businesses at this point), 15 minutes is a good interval—it's better than most free services, but not so frequent as to incur extra expense on my end for bandwidt…

Good to hear you have a plan :-) From my experience, going from one to multiple monitoring nodes gets way more complicated than expected; make sure you have your timestamps across the nodes right, especially when you decide to go down with the interval to 1 minute or less. Also, investing time in a testing setup where all scenarios can be tested paid off greatly. Having scripts covering all edge cases lets you sleep…

Thanks, and am in full agreement with both the difficulty of multi-node sync and testing. I have test coverage of most of the front-end, but I need to do more with the backend to make sure what is working great now works great a year from now.

Re: Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

#15

Post by josscrowcroft »

Love it, very nice and simple - best of luck. With a site that simple, A/B testing is going to be much easier and more productive I think.

My feedback would be:

- I'd be happy to pay twice as much if you offered 1-minute monitoring (or even 2 or 5, worth testing those)

- If you're going after small businesses (for whom a 15-min interval is sufficient) then I'd go all out on the branding for that. "Uptime monitoring for the rest of us" kind of thing. Make the 'no bells and whistles' approach the primary feature! That's how https://openexchangerates.org became popular (it's the simplest API to work with, and accurate enough for most users, while not needing to be the absolute gold-standard...)

Re: Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

#16

Post by geerlingguy »

josscrowcroft wrote: post #15

Love it, very nice and simple - best of luck. With a site that simple, A/B testing is going to be much easier and more productive I think. My feedback would be: - I'd be happy to pay twice as much if you offered 1-minute monitoring (or even 2 or 5, worth testing those) - If you're going after small businesses (for whom a 15-min interval is sufficient) then I'd go all out on the branding for that. "Uptime monitoring f…

Very helpful feedback; a couple people have told me they'd like to see a higher-tier plan with the option of more servers, and more frequent checks. I'm definitely considering this, but need to do more testing on my end to make sure I can scale well while adding on these kinds of features.

My #1 goal is to only have the features necessary to make the service great for most individuals/small developers. I think a better plan would work well with that.

Re: Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

#19

Post by geerlingguy »

chrisfarms wrote: post #18

We started something similar last year ( http://erlywarn.com ) ... for very similar reasons ... good luck my fellow competitor :)

Looks very nice, and a good Boostrap-based landing page to boot! Thanks for the good luck wishes, too :)

Re: Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring

#20

Post by geerlingguy »

imtu80 wrote: post #17

I use watchmouse, there are tones of other companies doing it. How is your service better than others? This morning I signed up a free account with http://www.verelo.com/ to check their features.

The main things are:

Pricing: $1.25/month ($15/year) compares pretty favorably with most services I've seen (most start at $5/month or $50/year).

SMS: Most services either charge extra (~$0.20/message on average, or add a service fee for SMS notifications. Or, they only offer email-to-SMS, so you're not getting properly-formatted messages from a real phone number.

Simplicity: I'm trying to make this service as simple as possible to use. If you need a ton of special features, there are a lot of sites that give that to you—however, I just want to add servers to monitor, add my contact information, and forget about things until one of my servers goes down. Which hopefully never happens :)

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