Show HN: 404Engine's remotely hosted error pages, and scratching my own itch.

1 points by bgnm2000 ↗ HN
A few months ago a friend made a joke about a service that remotely hosted error pages. I stopped whatever I was yammering about, and told him I thought it was legitimately a great idea.

As someone whose built a bunch of different web apps over the past few years, nothing is a bigger pain in the ass than creating error pages. Its the only part of your app that has literally nothing to do with your product - only your product failing! Whats even worse is people care about them now. Everything from blippy's double rainbow (remember that?), to the fail whale, to tumble beasts.

Error pages have become important, they've become a part of your product's branding. This is especially annoying when you're building an app you want to launch fast, because its just one more thing you have to care about and spend time on, when all you want to be doing is shipping new features.

So, thats why I felt quick and easy custom remote error pages was a good idea. And I built it (no worries, I also asked my friend to build it with me).

404engine has a nice little feature where you're emailed if an error page is seen over X times in one day. AKA, ALERT: go solve the problem!

Eventually I'll ad more features, but for now I really wanted to get something out the door.

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Pricing is as follows:

* $1.99/site you have (only charged once the site is activated)

* 200 requests per site per month, each additional request is $0.01

The thought behind the pricing is this - if you have people seeing more than 200 error pages per month, something is really wrong #1, but #2, you're getting a $0.01 motivator to fix that error every time afterwards.

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You can create a page here: http://www.404engine.com

You can see a demo of a live page here: http://guzzed.com/test/404.html

Anyway, I'd love feedback on the concept / pricing / ui / implementation etc!

2 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 10.3 ms ] thread
I like the auto e-mail alert feature. Cool!
I think you should explain more about the service. Going straight to a demo is good, but for a service like this the server-side implementations steps are very important.

There are a few ways of supporting remote errors pages, which are you using?