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Ask HN: review startup uptimerobot.com (free uptime checking)

12 points by bandhunt ↗ HN
Uptime Robot (http://uptimerobot.com) is a free (for now) uptime checking service. The idea is that maybe an ad-supported model can work (instead of a pingdom type subscription service).

Would you use this? Is the $10/month for pingdom inconsequential and it's more about the features for you? Thoughts?

Thanks!

8 comments

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grobolom
Sounds very cool - I wouldn't use this at the moment, but I could definitely see having some projects that require this type of monitoring. $10 is definitely inconsequential, but guaranteed monitoring is very useful.
LeBlanc
One cool thing you could do is to allow the user to put a widget on their site showing their uptime percentage. Uptime Robot is, in essence, an impartial 3rd party that can guarantee website's uptime claims. This might be something you could charge for.

Good luck!

duck
So the ads would be in the notifications? I don't see anyone clicking on them if their site just went down.
byoung2
One idea for advertising is to have users enter details about their hosting company. You would then be able to run analytics on companies with the best measured uptime and promote them with affiliate links. Also for people hosting with "bad" companies (based on your analytic) you can email them an affiliate link and get them to switch.
grobolom
Just something I though of that might make your frontpage more interesting - emphasize the importance of uptime and the alerts system.

I think the main feature of this is the very quick alerts system for smaller-scale websites - obviously, for large projects with dozens of users per minute, you might need faster than 5-minute refresh. But I think that emphasizing the Instant Alerts, Free is one of the more important things here.

I think for most, the uptime amount itself is going to be a secondary measure - some other analytics software also does it for free on top of the standard log/click/visitor/path/etc. tracking.

Then again, maybe I'm nuts. but that's what I got out of it : )

justinchen
I see the homepage mentions 5 minute intervals. I pay for pingdom because they offer 1 minute intervals. Are you planning to offer increased frequency?
slig
Seems cool and useful. I'm using, thanks! ;-)