Comment by rozenmd

I needed a weekly report for my contracting clients to prove their web host sucked to the point where it was costing them significant money.

They were paying for cheapest tier WordPress hosting at the time, and didn't believe me when I said random 5 min blocks of downtime throughout the day were adding up.

I built a dirt-simple form that takes a URL and sends a notification when the site goes down/up, with a weekly summary email.

Then, I kept adding features every day, 2 hours at a time, even after I stopped being a contractor.

That app was OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com).

Since then I also added status pages, like https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/

As well as cron job monitoring, to ensure database backups and whatnot run when I expect.