Show HN: usefulping, will alert you if your webapp is down

by Adirael • 14 years ago

8 13 14 years ago

Adirael6• 14 years ago

Last week one of my little toys went down. I was busy and I didn't realize till six hours has passed so I throw together this little app. It's probably a bit buggy but should work mostly OK. It supports HTTPS but doesn't check certificates. It also should support redirects.

If you see anything not working as it should or have any suggestion, I would love to hear some feedback!

EDIT: There was a little but I already fixed in which some sites were being sent notifications even if they were up, let me know if it happens to you!

twelve45• 14 years ago

Good work. Small typo on your frontpage that you may want to fix: "webiste".

Adirael6• 14 years ago

Thanks, it's corrected now.

lrm• 14 years ago

I like it. Nice and simple. One thing I'd like to see is being able to submit multiple apps/sites at the same time.

Adirael6• 14 years ago

Maybe adding a 'Bulk' button somewhere and turning the input in a textarea (and disabling the substring search) would work...

barryhunter• 14 years ago

Why should we trust this service? How do we know what ever system you have running the pings is reliable?

Nearly every free app I've seen like this has ended up getting pulled because the dev underestimates the resources needed to run it. Its easy to run when only a few apps being monitored, but not trivial at scale.

Adirael6• 14 years ago

As long as I'm not taking money for it you shouldn't trust it. It's not scalable without taking money from people. I can probably some hundred URLs with the resources I've got right now, but nothing serious.

Right now I only check from one location and there's probably some bugs in my code (which I'll work on fixing as soon as I find them!) but I'm planning to add a second location in order to have some redundancy.

What this thing does is simple enough to replicate in a bash script (it's just some curl and text matching) but today it was a slow day and things got out of hand a bit :)

niggler• 14 years ago

First line says

    usefulPing pools your site every minute and tells you if it goes down.

Do you mean to say polls ?

Adirael6• 14 years ago

Yes. I was watching Community while writing the copy and was a bit distracted. I corrected it, thanks!

StuieK• 14 years ago

Best excuse ever.

zalew• 14 years ago

how would you compare your service to http://www.monitor.us/website-monitoring (which I'm happily using for a few years)

Adirael6• 14 years ago

That's really cool, I didn't knew them.

Comparatively... They have a product and I got an MVP. Dashboard, response times, an API, etc. That's a lot to offer.

I just needed email notifications :)

jasoncrawford• 14 years ago

Great idea, but Pingdom already does this job nicely.

Show HN: usefulping, will alert you if your webapp is down

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