Was it up?-service is now offline. | Hacker News Reader

Was it up?-service is now offline.

wasitup.com

31 pointsjrnkntl21 comments

Unfortunately it seems like its become the "it" thing to close down web services. I don't understand why people don't opt to sell the sites instead? It might not make you rich, but hopefully you'll find the right buyer that will keep it alive for all of your current visitors. Website buying and selling has become very easy over the years. List it yourself on a marketplace or if that seems like a daunting task there are numerous website brokers who would be glad to find the right buyer for you.

Selling is not an option for me. This service was offered for free for over 2 years[1]. If you rely on free services things like this happen all the time.

As I've mentioned elsewhere: if time permits I'll have a go at re-launching with a new back-end and subscriptions (hopefully Stripe will be available in Europe soon) for the most heavy users.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=886875

I think you might be making a mistake taking the service offline and waiting until you re-launch it. Every day it's offline you're going to be bleeding users and by the time you relaunch you'll be starting from ground zero.

Why don't you do something like reach out to hacker news users. I'm sure there's some aspiring biz dev types with a little bit of capital (sounds like you only need a couple hundred dollars a month to keep it operating) to invest some time and money into your business. Then you have a little time to pivot into a money-making version of your site... fremium of whatever model makes sense.

But right now you have one of the toughest things to get... a bunch of users. (myself included) Don't squander them!

I've been a wasitup user since your first announcement. Thank you for making it; it has been perfect for my use case (keeping an eye on servers that I don't touch very frequently).

As a casual user, I would have paid money if you had an option to watch 1-5 servers.

Good luck with a relaunch, if that's what you decide to do. (And good luck with whatever else you decide to work on)

Wrote my own website monitor in a couple hours

http://i.imgur.com/oQh8V.png

Not that hard to do if you have access to multiple servers to monitor each other, it's a good coding exercise.

Just use curl and grab all the curl_getinfo results, including the dns resolve time to the firstbyte time to the page size and page transfer speed/time.

Log it, graph it, and if you get a bad result, email yourself an alert.

Don't forget to exclude the polling server from your stats!

This is a big bummer to me. I asked Eivind if he is going to open source the site, and he said he will try, but he needs to write documentation as well as clean up the current release. Hopefully that will happen sooner than later. wasitup was so much easier to sign up for than any other service I've used.

Anybody know of any decent, reasonably priced, alternatives?

Creator of wasitup here. http://pingdom.com has worked reliably for me.

I really liked wasitup, so thanks for providing the service for this long.

I relied on wasitup and would have paid for it. But I'm in the same position with Calepin. It's just too much work getting periodical payments running for a pet project. Waiting for Stripe EU. Rumor has it GreenQloud might be coming up with a payment solution in this space too though, with very competitive rates.

Anyway -- signed up for pingdom.com and it looks solid enough.

http://alertfox.com/free-website-monitoring/ (free 5-min monitoring)

Disclosure: I am the founder (on the other hand, this means I can assure you that the free plan is really free and we have no plans to change that).

Assuming from the name this was a monitoring app: 1) http://mon.itor.us/ has a free version, and it's decent but very infrequent (ex. 30 minutes) 2) NewRelic RPM has ping-based monitoring included in even their free plan (and it's ping interval is much more agressive).

We started a project a few months ago to provide a similar simple monitoring/uptime service.

http://erlywarn.com/

Also check out http://aremysitesup.com

We've been monitoring hundreds of thousands of sites for years, and our pricing is low.

Can't this be run from a 4 usd/mo vps?

More like 9 20 USD/mo VPSes for the amount of sites I had and frequency of checking (and double-checking on failure). Some optimizations could have been done with regards to the implementation (moving from Python to Go/C which I have a POC of).

Any possibility of open-sourcing?

First I'd like to try re-release with a new architecture. If that does not pan out I'd be open to releasing the source.

What would be a cost efficient way of doing the same? Any ideas?

We're not offering a window to the past but: http://wheresitup.com/ has some nice geo features.

relase?

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