Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

My aim with Ping Brigade certainly is to improve lives. Servers go up and down all the time. It is actually quite shocking what you find when you start monitoring one 24/7. Ping Brigade is affordable (or free), and dead simple to set up server monitoring. I believe that helping more websites stay up for the price of two lattes a month is a good thing.

Link: https://www.pingbrigade.com/

EDIT: Before I added the monitoring piece, Ping Brigade just had the latency measuring component. One of the users contacted me reporting a bug: sometimes Ping Brigade would tell him that his site was down when he could see that it was not. It turned out he had set up round robin DNS with four web servers and on one of them, apache was misconfigured. I know that this was tiny and anekdotal, but it was nice getting an email from the user saying thanks for helping him figure it out.

You should add SMS and phone support. I have custom scripts that do this for me through Twilio.

The first two failed tests go to SMS, the next ones will call me directly on my mobile and tell me the issue using Twilio's text to voice API.

I have a half written Rails app that I was going to release as a webservice, but I can't be bothered. I'd gladly pay you instead.

Yes, SMS is next on my TODO list (along with full IPv6 support and downtime history). Twillio conveniently lowered their prices recently too. If you'd like, I can shoot you an e-mail when this feature is complete. Or just follow @pingbrigade on Twitter.

Nice and simple interface - but the idea itself seems to be a variation on what alertfox or pingdom are doing?

Then again, competition improves lives as well ;)

Thank you. Yes this space is definitely very busy. Ping Brigade started as a way for me to do my own monitoring. Pingdom has a lot of features and is huge, but they are also more expensive. I also do not like their interface: they ask too many questions. But getting traffic has been challenging: the CPC for things like "web monitoring" is in the $6-9 range.

good job :)

Thanks.

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