Website Monitoring Tool

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12450484

by justinkbug • 10 years ago

3 11 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm playing around with building my own website monitoring tool for myself and my clients. I've thought about opening it up and selling it as a service. Right now it's free though and I'd like people to check it out and let me know what they think. I have several new features I'll be adding to it, but for now it's a simple thing.

https://galacticwebservices.com/monitoring

Moftare• 10 years ago

I just added my website, not sure what it is capable of?

justinkbug5• 10 years ago

It basically pings your site every 5 minutes and checks for an html status code of 200 OK. If it gets anything different or can't make a connection it should send you an email. I need to add some logging so people can view it's history. I'm also going to add element checking, so that for any given URL, you can add something on the page that you want it to check too, like whether or not a link exists or a button, etc.

chriskottom• 10 years ago

It would be worth spending 10 minutes to write up some quick copy to that effect. When I entered my URL, I felt like it went into a black hole as there was no mention of "what happens now".

kgtm2• 10 years ago

Any ideas on how you are going to promote it? Are you good with marketing? At the very least you need to add a demo dashboard to highlight the available features, before I have to spend time making an account.

Judging from similar projects I've pursued, writing code seems to be the easiest task these days.

justinkbug5• 10 years ago

Thanks for the comment.

Yea, I've done my share of marketing. I don't know if I would claim I'm good at it or not. Right now, everything is a bit rough, so it needs some work. I just wanted to get something out and start getting peoples thoughts. If I decide to move forward with it, I'll clean everything up, and create a better landing page for it, explaining features, etc.

This isn't anything new. There are other monitoring apps out there, but some of them are a bit expensive. I'm thinking about charging half of what the others charge.

kgtm2• 10 years ago

If you do decide to move forward with it, check out https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses for inspiration, there are a few people doing similar stuff. Some direct links:

https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/updown-io [ 1.5k/mo ]

https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/amon [ 1.5k/mo ]

https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/apex-ping [ 1.0k/mo ]

Gustomaximus• 10 years ago

As a marketer, thanks for saying that. Many on the technical end are dismissive of the value of marketing with 2 predominant views; 1) If its a good product the customers will come or 2) I can do that myself.

To be fair this seems to be a reducing pool last few years for some reason. And there are some god awful marketers out there.

saluki• 10 years ago

I've been thinking about starting a similar service based on requests from clients for various types of monitoring.

Seems like there is lots of competition. And I'm not sure this is an aspirin or a vitamin. http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-92-12...

But if it's specialized and at the right price provides the right value then why not?

There are lots of services out there bringing in $100k/yr that are niche and even when seeing their shared revenue numbers I'm always surprised it's possible.

If it's something you enjoy working on and think you can market it go for it.

Looks like you're building this in PHP, check out the Laravel Framework, cashier is built in for connecting with stripe, Spark ($100 per major release) is close to SaaS in a box, checkout homestead/valet for local dev, and forge for server creation/deployment. (if you haven't already).

Good luck, keep us updated.

justinkbug5• 10 years ago

The first thing I'm going to add is add a log so that you can actually see the status of your site over time. Then I'm going to start cleaning things up and probably add a couple of features I would like to have.

Website Monitoring Tool

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