[robertbalent]

Hi Hacker News,

My name is Robert and I'm a software engineer from Vancouver BC. Few months ago I decided to quit my job and try to make something on my own. Please check it out.

Monitoria is an active monitoring service for websites or basically any HTTP/S endpoints. It will periodically send HTTP requests to the selected URL and when it starts receiving errors, it will send you a notification.

The whole service is hosted on Digital Ocean costing about 45$ per month. It consists of PostgreSQL managed database (15$), two web servers (2x5$) behind a load balancer (10$), and two worker servers (2x5$) used for sending monitoring requests. CloudFront for hosting CSS files and SES for sending notification emails.

I'm using maybe a little bit boring stack - Java and Spring Boot. Plus Tailwind CSS library for styling. Worker service is using a scheduling library to trigger monitoring requests at regular intervals (https://github.com/kagkarlsson/db-scheduler). Payments are integrated with Paddle service (https://paddle.com/).

Please check it out and let me know what you think. I would be happy to hear any comments or ideas for improvement.

If you think about any feature that may be useful for you, send me an email. I may be able to build it.

Thank you very much!

Robert

[XCSme]

Congrats on your first project, landing page looks nice and clean!

My first thought checking the product: The pricing is insane.

Second thought: There is no list of features. It only pings a URL? How does it send notifications? Do I receive SMS alerts?

Who is the target audience? Why would I choose this over any other uptime monitoring solution, especially considering the much higher pricing (as someone else mentioned, UptimeRobot and others even have free plans). Some alternatives also provide multi-location monitoring, which makes sure that your website is up globally, not only in a specific region, without this feature I wouldn't pay for a monitoring system.

This space feels pretty crowded, with many interesting alternatives: https://uptimerobot.com/ https://www.pingdom.com/product/uptime-monitoring/ https://uptime.com/ https://www.statuscake.com/ https://pingr.io/

[omnifollow]

Looks nice! I currently use a free version of Uptime Robot and have no idea how they monetize.

A helpful piece of info on your landing page would be to include the frequency with which you'll ping my server. UptimeRobot does every five minutes for free so more frequently would be nice.

In general though it would be hard for me to switch because Uptime Robot is free and gives me adequate service.

[robertbalent]

Thank you very much for your comment.

You are right, Uptime Robot is very similar and it's free.

Currently Monitoria supports only 5-minute monitoring frequency. But it would be pretty easy to allow 1-minute intervals.

You said you are getting only adequate service from Uptime Robot. What features are you missing? Is there anything groundbreaking which would make you switch?

Thanks, Robert

[omnifollow]

From time to time I consider paying for their pro plan but haven’t pulled the trigger yet because of the infrequency of downtime on my sites vs. the monthly cost.

You could build a bare bones version of uptime robot with minute interval checks and charge maybe $36/year for fifty checks and I would start to consider it. But like with uptime robot I’m not sure!