Show HN: Little Warden, monitoring the tedious things about websites | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Little Warden, monitoring the tedious things about websites

littlewarden.com

109 pointsthehodge30 comments

Hey HN,

Little Warden is a tool that my wife and I have been building in our spare time.

We constantly see people who lose domains due to expiration or forget about an SSL certificate renewal so we started building some software for that then it expanded more and more and now it performs loads of the checks you tend to forget about once a site is launched.

LW monitors everything and once a day sends you an email with a summary.

When your pricing page says "10 checks per URL" etc what does it mean? I assume it means that more things are checked as you move up the tiers but I couldn't find any table of what things were checked at what pricepoints.

Edit: there's a problem with your payments flow. I signed up, paid, and got another prompt to pay. I reloaded that page and saw that my card was saved, so I hit it again and got another prompt to pay. I signed in using the email confirmation and got a prompt to pay showing my card, which then redirected me /subscriptions which 404s. There's an authorisation sitting on my card for a null amount.

Hi Mabcat,

Sorry about that I've been driving home all day, I'm going to look into that straight away and email you.

Minimum £14.99/ month.

Looks like it might be a useful service for some businesses.

It seems like the minimum is £6 for a single site actually, and yeah it does seem potentially useful at some scales.

Looks neat, but it's prohibitively expensive to use for a personal website which doesn't generate revenue. I use CloudFlare (at $5/mo), but close to $17/mo for this service dwarfs my hosting + CDN fees together. I'd love to see a free or low-cost service that just checks SSL cert expiration and sends me an email 30 days before it expires. Would be great for making sure my personal website isn't broken without breaking the bank.

Doesn't your SSL provider send you said mail ?

Yes, but that's based on their information, it's not "monitoring". Monitoring is an external system not influenced by the others which observes and reports. It'd be nice to be able to monitor this, although for my personal website its not absolutely critical. Do you think your SSL provider is infallible?

Just use letsencrypt, it renews automatically

And even if you don’t set that up they still email you when it’s about to expire

Which isn't the same as monitoring if you actually use it. Seen more than enough LE sites where someone configured server reloading wrongly (and in at least one case, a package update overrode their config), which means they have a valid LE cert (and thus no LE notification) but clients get the expired one.

You mean, like https://certificatemonitor.org/?

https://secure.expirify.com is a free option that works well. I believe I discovered it on HN.

Stick to your guns on pricing, it helps keep away customers you don't want.

This seems like a great idea. I would be interested in detecting 404's as well. This would need to be configurable because not all 404's you care about, but some you likely do. Great idea none the less.

Hi Kyle, could you shoot me an email at dom@littlewarden.com about this, we do detect 404 pages and pages giving 404 response codes but I'd like to know more about your needs

Shameless plug alert! I made something similar +/- some features. https://lnkchk.com

Would love this if it also checked 404 assets and links.

Hi Pudo, could you shoot me an email Dom@littlewarden.com as to what you would like and I'll look into it

I would love to see a free version for just one domain.

Hi Marco, we have a £60 a year version for one site, I'm sorry but we don't have plans for a free package at the moment

Nice idea and execution.

But at £ 15 for the least expensive plan, and no free starter plan for say, just single domain owners, I think this might be prohibitively expensive for most...

Thanks justboxing, I appreciate the feedback, at the moment I wouldn't be able to support hundreds of clients on a free or reduced priced plan for one domain

don't listen to anyone who thinks $20/month is 'prohibitively' expensive for anyone who runs a commercial website, i.e. one that shouldn't go down over a small oversite like domain expiration. it's not too much.

Agree. I would say that if they can't afford that then they are not your customer are right now. Serve the ones who can pay.

> don't listen to anyone who thinks $20/month is 'prohibitively' expensive for anyone who runs a commercial website

I'm telling you from practical experience. I've helped several Indian and Pakistani restaurants in San Francisco register domain names, get hosting and then built their websites. These are the people that need a service like Little Warden, cos routinely an owner would call me and say "Hey my website is not accessible." or worse still "Someone stole my site." -- cos they let the card expire, or used some obscure AOL account or changed phones etc - and someone registered their expired domain. Restaurant owners are notoriously disorganized w.r.t. their digital / online presence.

I can also tell you from practical experience that these small business owners don't want to spend 20$ / month = 240$ / year for guarding their site, when the domain registration and hosting is far less than that.

At this pricing range, maybe Little Warden's target user-base is corporate / enterprise clients, the "5000 dollars is a rounding error" companies.

Hi justboxing, thanks for your comments. I fully appreciate what you're saying but I'd be unable to scale LW with that many customers paying < £6 a month.

Whilst I'd LOVE a bunch of clients where 5000 dollars is a rounding error, that's not our target client.

Our target client is a small to medium business with multiple domains or a digital agency that is responsible for (but may not control) a domain / website.

> These are the people that need a service like Little Warden

you just typed out two very convincing paragraphs that they are not, actually, in fact, in need of this service. you might think they are - in which case, you should make your own service, and sell it for the price point you think it really is at.

> Indian and Pakistani restaurants in San Francisco

to everyone reading, if your target demographic is neighborhood restaurants run by people on razor thin margins who want to pay peanuts for a 24/7 service that will probably wake the founding team up at 3am fairly regularly for several months if not years on end until they make sufficient money (if ever), listen to this guy, his advice is spot-on.

The pricing is completely reasonable; we are probably going to get the £400/year plan as an agency. I agree the £6 single domain pricing could be more visible. Take advice from customers, not tire-kickers.

There seems to be a £6/€8/$10 plan for one site, though it's barely visible under the primary pricing. I think it should be made a little more visible - less prominent than the main plans, but still noticeable.

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