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Simple monitoring with SMS - $1/month for 1 year! [Server Check.in]
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Simple monitoring with SMS - $1/month for 1 year! [Server Check.in]

geerlingguygeerlingguy Member
edited July 2013 in Offers

Hey everyone!

I've discovered some awesome (and some not-so-awesome) hosting providers through this site, as well as some other awesome services like NodePing and Uptime Robot, and I wanted to announce my own service here.

Scratching my own itch, I've been building Server Check.in over the past six months now, and I thought it would be a good time to introduce it to this community—it's a very low cost website/server monitoring service. It has all the basic features (HTTP check, content check, ping check, email/SMS notifications, latency graphs), it costs $1.25/month for the normal plan, and it sends out actual SMS messages (no cheap email-to-SMS gateways) so you can set a special text tone for when your site's down and you need to wake up—stat!

I really like (and use) other monitoring services for certain sites, and would definitely recommend something like Pingdom or one of the 'big names' for complex monitoring scenarios, but these services are often cumbersome and expensive. Thus, Server Check.in.

I hope you like it—sign up with the coupon code LET13INTRO to get 20% off (that's $1/month for the first year!). Coupon expires on 8/30/13.

Please let me know what you think of the service, and what I could do to make it better for you.

Thanked by 1marshallford

Comments

  • geerlingguygeerlingguy Member
    edited July 2013

    (Note: I posted this a month ago before reading the community guidelines for this forum, and it was pretty quickly deleted because I hadn't yet met the requirements for posting an offer. I'm posting again now that I've been around a little longer and have a (small) posting history).

    Also, be sure to check out a 404 page—I made sure to make it a little nicer than most that I've created in the past :)

    [Edit: Ah, you sneaky people... && cat /etc/passwd on the 404 page won't work—I'm not that dumb ;-)]

  • niceboyniceboy Veteran

    You don't accept paypal? I could not find it on your order page.

  • @niceboy said:
    You don't accept paypal? I could not find it on your order page.

    Right now I only accept payment via CC, through Stripe. I've been thinking about accepting PayPal, and may do so at some point, but it's a little extra hassle to make sure both payment systems are working, and I haven't been very happy with the PayPal user experience in the past (I currently use PayPal for another service I run through Midwestern Mac).

  • @geerlingguy said:
    I haven't been very happy with the PayPal user experience in the past

    Most of us as prospective customers are, though.

  • trewqtrewq Administrator, Patron Provider

    Just curious about the redundancy of your monitoring network. Is it geographically spread out?

  • geerlingguygeerlingguy Member
    edited July 2013

    @joelgm said:
    Most of us as prospective customers are, though.

    Noted :-)

    I'll consider adding PayPal to the payment options soon.

    @trewq said:
    Just curious about the redundancy of your monitoring network. Is it geographically spread out?

    Right now, there are only two monitoring locations; I wrote a little about how Server Check.in is using Node.js for the status checks on the blog, and I have things built out in a way that allows for more servers to be added as I need them.

    However, as I've been working on building out the basic features more than the infrastructure (so far), I haven't been working towards making sure extra monitoring locations are added yet—doing so adds a little more complexity, because if I'm going to advertise as being 'geographically diverse', I want that to mean something. So I need to add in a way to make sure servers are checked from different locations frequently (a feature I don't have right now—it's a first come, first serve basis for checking individual servers from different locations).

    Server Check.in does, however, verify a server is down with one extra check (separated by one minute from the first down report) before sending notifications or marking the server as being down.

  • niceboyniceboy Veteran

    Please do make a new thread in offers when you support paypal. thx

  • haryhary Member

    Same here, will try if support paypal

  • @niceboy said:
    Please do make a new thread in offers when you support paypal. thx

    @hary said:
    Same here, will try if support paypal

    I guess I should make that a priority, then! :)

  • This is really awesome, however i would prefer to roll my own service. Any chance I could buy the source? Kidding... Good luck.

    Side note: Anyone know of any self-hosted alternatives?

  • SplitIceSplitIce Member, Host Rep
    edited July 2013

    @marshallford wrap zabbix, nagios or cacti etc in a simplistic wrapper and a SMS gateway?

  • @SplitIce said:
    marshallford wrap zabbix, nagios or cacti etc in a simplistic wrapper and a SMS gateway?

    Just thinking out loud... How bout bash script + cron + lynx + a gmail/external smtp account for sending an email?
    Then for a web gui, my website can check if cron leaves a txt file that says if the site is up or down.

    I wish it was this easy, because if it was... i'd do it. You just have to make sure your monitoring server doesn't go down.

  • geerlingguygeerlingguy Member
    edited July 2013

    @marshallford said:
    This is really awesome, however i would prefer to roll my own service. Any chance I could buy the source? Kidding... Good luck.

    Side note: Anyone know of any self-hosted alternatives?

    Nagios is pretty good, if a little complex to set up the first time. And instead of trying to build out SMS integration, you can just send an email to your mobile number's email-to-SMS gateway (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways, and note—this is what most of the less-expensive monitoring services do if they say they have 'free SMS'; the disadvantage is that texts come from random numbers and in a funky format... So you can't set a special text tone for texts from the monitoring service, and texts are a bit messy).

    Also, a lot of the code I used to build Server Check.in is already open source:

    ...and I plan on releasing more libraries as I get time to generalize the code.

  • @geerlingguy pretty sweet and simple. Mind sharing how you handle the SMS messaging? I'm guessing it costs you some thing.

  • ranieranie Member

    Just signed up. Looking good. Simpel and clean to setup.
    I am using munin for collecting historical data. But as a simpel easy availability test with sms alert.
    Thisted is just perfect

  • @natestamm said:
    geerlingguy pretty sweet and simple. Mind sharing how you handle the SMS messaging? I'm guessing it costs you some thing.

    I use Twilio for SMS, and it costs $1/month to reserve a phone number, plus $0.01/SMS to send (or more, sometimes up to $0.07/SMS for international messages). I priced the service so there's still a little margin to make it worthwhile, but sending actual SMS messages means there's no way I could offer the service free, like some other uptime monitors that use email-to-SMS gateways.

    @ranie said:
    Just signed up. Looking good. Simpel and clean to setup.
    I am using munin for collecting historical data. But as a simpel easy availability test with sms alert.
    Thisted is just perfect

    Thanks, glad you like it!

  • Looks really good but the 5 minute check intervals prevents me from becoming a customer. Hopefully this will be available in the future.

    Good luck with sales :)

  • @Makkesk8 said:
    Looks really good but the 5 minute check intervals prevents me from becoming a customer. Hopefully this will be available in the future.

    Good luck with sales :)

    What interval would entice you to sign up?

    I'm planning on making a few changes so more frequent intervals will be possible at the same price points, but I need to make sure the architecture can handle it. Stability and good UX are my top priorities :)

  • @geerlingguy said:
    I'm planning on making a few changes so more frequent intervals will be possible at the same price points, but I need to make sure the architecture can handle it. Stability and good UX are my top priorities :)

    1 minute check intervals would get me to signup :)

    Also there's no Paypal payment option?

  • @Makkesk8 said:
    Also there's no Paypal payment option?

    Working on it... as mentioned earlier, I wanted to launch with CC payments, and add more processors as time goes on. PayPal has one of the most annoying APIs ever, and their subscription management is even worse than standard one-off payments :(

    But it'll happen.

  • @geerlingguy said:
    But it'll happen.

    Thats good, Paypal aint that important to me since Mastercard has some neat features such as creating a virtual CC that can have a specific amount of cash on it and expire when ever...

    So yea CC payments are not that scary to me anymore :P

    Anyways if 1 minute check intervals would be possible I would probably signup :)

  • Add me to the list of if paypal was accepted I'd sign up

  • @geerlingguy 5 minutes isn't so bad. I was hoping some one would at least mention a smaller interval so I could pull you off on a tangent again! That is, for some one who might be blocking ICMP and let's just say that perhaps due to missing or improper glue records, maybe a bad route or /delegation, and can't get a good status code return-Is your system in that case doing any verification using dig or host or hope fully not ns lookup? I have seen some cases where a tight system and some users on poor nets complain about sites being down when they are not. In some cases if that problem is far reaching your best bet can only really be to confirm that authority should be in place. Like using a dig +trace, and knowing that delegation is operational in a best /worse case scenario type of deal.

  • @natestamm said:
    for some one who might be blocking ICMP and let's just say that perhaps due to missing or improper glue records, maybe a bad route or /delegation, and can't get a good status code return-Is your system in that case doing any verification using dig or host or hope fully not ns lookup? I have seen some cases where a tight system and some users on poor nets complain about sites being down when they are not. In some cases if that problem is far reaching your best bet can only really be to confirm that authority should be in place. Like using a dig +trace, and knowing that delegation is operational in a best /worse case scenario type of deal.

    Honestly, this issue hasn't come up, probably partly due to the fact that most people do HTTP checks on host names (using DNS), but mostly stick to IP addresses for ping.

  • bubbabubba Member
    edited August 2013

    @marshallford https://github.com/fzaninotto/uptime is a free one I tried this month. I decided it'd be too much of a pain to maintain the multiple instances myself, so I looked for free services.

    @geerlingguy Wondering why you're limiting the checks to every 5 minutes for a paid site? There are other free sites (port-monitor.com) that allow 1 minute checks for free. They also support direct port monitoring for verifying MySQL is up. Email->SMS is fine and actually Email->Prowl is what I prefer.

  • @bubba said:
    geerlingguy Wondering why you're limiting the checks to every 5 minutes for a paid site? There are other free sites (port-monitor.com) that allow 1 minute checks for free. They also support direct port monitoring for verifying MySQL is up. Email->SMS is fine and actually Email->Prowl is what I prefer.

    At launch, my top priorities were stability and scalability; so I didn't want to monitor at an interval I wasn't sure my current infrastructure could handle reliably.

    I'm close to finishing a major revision to the way the checks are handled that will allow me to monitor at 1 minute intervals, but I am still trying to figure out whether I can handle it at scale.

    Monitoring a dozen servers (and tracking latencies over time in a database) is simple. Monitoring 1,000+ servers (where I am right now) requires more work—consider that you're pinging more than one server per second—and writing the result to a database—all day every day. Using Node.js for the server checking was a step forward, and the next step is the revision I'm working on now. Expect more blog posts about it soon!

    Many free uptime providers don't offer latency graphing (which requires database storage of check log data—which is a real expense!) or real SMS alerts (which allows people to set a special ring tone or mark a number for exclusion from do not disturb mode on their phones).

    Ultimately, though, I built Server Check.in for myself—and I'm going to put in whatever features I want for a price I would pay ;-)

  • I'd be interested in this service if you added paypal as a payment option.

  • I've just added two more check servers, and am working on getting PayPal payments set up. Unfortunately, this might have to wait a little longer as I'm trying to complete a couple other more pressing features that some of the existing users have been asking for, like improved dashboards and public status pages.

    Rest assured, I'm getting there!

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