Comment by SantiagoVargas

Comment by SantiagoVargas 3 days ago

Built YourServerIsDown.com as a side project that we needed for our startup... anyone else have the issue of not finding out quickly enough if your server went down?

For our app it's super important as if our server goes down, users can download the app but get stuck at the sign in flow. There's subscription services out there that do more in-depth monitoring but this is all we needed.

I listed an alternative solution below for those wanting to build or customize their own solution, ours just gets the job done, is quick to set up, and you can avoid the monthly twilio/sms fees.

Other alternative we received as feedback for those interested: "If any one wants an AWS Native way and assuming it has ALB you can target elb metric 503 via Cloudwatch Alarm and create an output to an SNS topic that goes to Slack, or use AWS chatbot/q, or set number as destination for sms via sns"

lurk2 3 days ago

If the service has no monthly fee, how is it being paid for?

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SantiagoVargas 3 days ago

It's a one-time 4.99 fee (covers a year of monitoring or 50 downtime events).

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- Zanfa 3 days ago
  
  That’s an annual subscription.
  
  Reply View | 3 replies
  
  SantiagoVargas 2 days ago
  
  I suppose you're right, unless your server goes down more than 50 times. I saw it as credits that expire in a year, would be a bit scary to offer monitoring in perpetuity for $5 if they didn't expire.
  
  Reply View | 2 replies
- thinkingemote 2 days ago
  
  interesting, how did you come up with the pricing? Similar other services?
  
  Reply View | 2 replies
  
  SantiagoVargas 2 days ago
  
  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 the ones that don't are self-hosted. This solution is for the small teams/indie devs that just need to know when their servers down. Might raise the price though, thinking the low price might work against me for quality perception. What do you think?
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  thinkingemote 2 days ago
  
  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
  
  Reply View | 0 replies

abcd_f 16 hours ago

As much as I appreciate the attitude of building something from scratch instead of exploring existing solutions, the uptime/server monitoring is a super-saturated market and it's been like that since the 00s if not earlier.

That is, it will be really hard for you to find customers.

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