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Hi,

I'm asked to sign up, but there are no details about the service. I don't even know how it can monitor my site. I have zero interest to give my email address at this stage, but that's the only thing I can do. You need to entice me to sign up, maybe by explaining the features and how come is this free.

I understand the ad strategy, but the above concern plus the fact that the landing page is full of ads doesn't give me confidence to sign up.

In my opinion, page views and especially on your landing page will not give you the desired value and it'll stop some people from signing up. Maybe you can do text ads (affiliate links?) in the footer of the emails sent by the system.

First off, I would like to thank you for your feedback. I do agree that both the landing page and ad-placement needs a lot of love. I'll bump that up on my list of things to do.

(Keep in mind, this site is something I've just begun throwing together after finding that alternatives either limit the # of sites, have horrible ping intervals, or simply no free option at all)

Edit: Added some basic information on the landing page. Also restricted Ads to the actual functionality pages. (Sites management / Site graphs)

If the goal is feedback, it might be better to have a link to a page that does not require login/signup because there is no technical documentation, demonstration video, or other supporting collateral.

I came to the site to learn about your product. Make it easy. Don't put barriers in my way. Don't optimize for your needs over your users'.

Good luck.

Working on getting a demo video done up soon. I will also be adding some more technical information to the landing page. Thanks for the advice!

Unfortunately the login is pretty much a requirement. I've thought about having an ephemeral page or something, but it really just doesn't work.

In what way is a login a requirement?

I did not feel it was necessary when I tried the demo.

Edit: my mistake. You will be able to see introduction and guides as they become available. You will only need to register to gain access to the functionality.
Now it has more information, but as far as I can tell you only send pings, right?

Nowadays, just icmp doesn't cut it. People want to know if their service is running, not so much if the server is running. Also, some big hosting providers (e.g. Azure) don't even reply to ping.

My suggestion is to add http/https queries. I'm not sure what do you use in the backend, but almost every language has an http library to make this easy for you.

If you'd like to have a look, one of my side projects is a monitoring site: https://datasnitch.co.uk

You are correct and your suggestion was already at the top of my list. It now supports HTTP/HTTPS and will notify you once your Certificate is about to expire.

I wanted to add a note to my site that if folks are looking for other options to check out some alternatives. Can I list yours?