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Ask HN: Please review our project SiteCanary

11 points by irrelative ↗ HN
https://sitecanary.com/

Hi everyone,

We've been working on SiteCanary for the last couple months. SiteCanary alerts you when your site goes down via email, SMS or instant message. It lets you configure various tests - "asserts" - to make sure lots of things are looking good (http status, mime type, IP, dns server, etc), and you can configure things in the request like cookies and user agent.

We realize the idea isn't very innovative, but we're working on related products that will be targeted at the audience (small-business website owner), and wanted to solve a simple problem first.

Create a demo account so you can play with it for free at: https://sitecanary.com/demoaccount (currently hidden... but you guys are friends)

Let us know what you think!

10 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] thread
aristus
Very clean value prop, easy and fast signup. Asserts is a good concept and well-done.

I can't tell if the test contact worked -- I did not receive an email or an IM. Don't know what contact to allow for gchat.

irrelative
Thanks for the feedback. Regarding IM, I think you need to add us to your buddylist for gmail (sitecanary@gmail.com) -- we'll make that clearer! Email should work always -- check your spam filter.

Cheers!

dantheman
Nice, simple & clean.

On the bottom of the assert page, why do you have an add Asserts button & a continue to checkups link? They should be combined into a continue button?

irrelative
Thanks for the feedback. We could see that being confusing... we'll fix it!
kiwidrew
It's a really clean site that feels responsive (even from .nz) and isn't too cluttered -- great work!

A few bits of feedback: - When I was adding a new site to check, it wasn't immediately clear whether you support sending text messages to non-US mobiles. The only example provided is formatted US-style (1-xxx-xxx-xxxx). I put in my NZ mobile as 6421xxxxxxx and it did in fact work. I'd suggest adding a second example number formatted as e.g. +44xxxxxxxxx and perhaps a link to a page listing the countries you support. - Perhaps an option to send a second text message when the site comes back up? - The subject line of the email which is sent when the site comes back up is simply 'SiteCanary: accountname:'. It'd be good to have this be 'SiteCanary: sitename is back!' instead.

irrelative
Thanks kiwidrew -- great feedback. We'll these fix things and they should be out soon.

Cheers!

jgfoot
I like it.

Your notification e-mails were flagged as spam by Yahoo mail. Consider using DomainKeys or something like that.

I noticed your TOS requires that we only monitor sites that we own. Smart. In case someone breaks this rule, you might want to give site owners a chance to report problems. Maybe you could have a unique string in the user-agent that would let you look up which of your users created that notification?

irrelative
We put SiteCanary in the user agent for that very reason -- we figure a really curious person could figure it out from there. That said, the fastest polling period is 1 minute, so we think it would be pretty hard to DoS someone with this :-)

Good idea with DomainKeys -- gmail seems to be alright with a reverse DNS lookup resolving to our domain.

Cheers!

smokey_the_bear
I like it a lot. I'd been looking for something just like this. I set up a test though, and when it alerted it only emailed me, I didn't receive the gchat messages or sms.

EDIT - Upon further fiddling with it, I added my AIM account in addition to GOOG, then I got both alerts.

smokey_the_bear
I'm trying to test a URL that checks if the result is cached, and if so, redirects to the cached text file. So the http response code is either 200 or 301, it'd be nice if I could set the the response code check to not 500. Also, I get an error when I try to remove the response code assert. "Error Check that the URL is correct. " https://sitecanary.com/deleteassert/1054/1110