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Comment by rozenmd

2 years ago

I've been running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) since early 2021 now (almost three years).

I recently wrote about how last year it grew twice as fast as I expected: https://maxrozen.com/2023-focus-single-product-pays-off

It all started because 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, responding to customer requests and fixing bugs 2 hours at a time, even after I stopped being a contractor.

Since then I also added status pages (example: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/) and cron job monitoring, to ensure database backups and whatnot run when I expect.

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rozenmd

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nicbou  2 years ago

This is really nice. The front page tells me everything I need to know.

For your consideration, I'm really struggling to find a tool like yours that expect a regular ping ("the daily build has not failed") and that support pushing a status ("the last build was green").

I have two matching use cases: one to detect when my static site generator fails to build in production, and the other to detect when my appointment finder does not find appointments for a longer period of time. I'd really like my uptime monitor to handle that, so that I don't have to implement something myself.

Another brilliant feature is allestörungen, which lets people report troubles with common services. It fulfils the similar niche of "is this down for anyone else?"