http://www.serverdensity.com
There are a lot of monitoring services available for up/down monitoring (e.g. Pingdom) or very detailed, complex monitoring (e.g. Hyperic/Nagios). The aim of Server Density is make internal (CPU load, disk space etc) monitoring as easy as possible as a hosted service.
What's with the logo? I see an "s" and a ???
Beautiful layout. Simple, elegant, informative: makes me really trust your service.
Oo, phone numbers! Very, very, very nice touch.
I wish there was US billing. I'm a little wary that my card will be charged in Sterling. Is "converted upon payment" a way of saying that my card will convert or that you'll convert and charge my card in USD? Also, I find it's good practice to just settle on an international price even if that means that sometimes different currencies see a discount/overcharge.
A volume discount would be nice. Monitoring 10 servers right now would run £100. Maybe do something like, £10/server for the first 5, £6/server for 6-20, and £3 for 21+. I'm guessing that the service doesn't put a lot of load on your box and a big client with an IT department who won't be wasting a lot of your time, but has a lot of boxes to monitor would be a catch. Small customers are sometimes the most hassle so offer volume discounts.
Nice to see an alive blog with actual interesting things on it rather than a simple "we have a blog" PR-type thing.
I gotta say, it looks mighty impressive. Clean, good looking, you seem to know your stuff, I don't have many questions. Really, the big issue I see is that there is no volume discount. I'd guess that the cost of dealing with two customers each monitoring one server is higher than one customer monitoring two servers. Especially as that number goes up - if I'm a network admin monitoring 50 boxes for a company, I know what I'm doing and will figure out things to a greater extent than some random one server person.
Very nice! Good luck!
Volume discounting is something we do have, just not on the site. Based on your feedback it seems it might be worth mentioning that on the pricing page.
Thanks for the feedback.
Your video is great, and the site design itself is quite nice, but the content itself may need to be fleshed out and reworked a bit - I'm generally not a huge screencast watcher, and if I didn't have an interest in the product I might've clicked past almost immediately.
For an example, I didn't realize that the screenshots were clickable at first glance. When I clicked on them I get a screenshot that's too large and zoomed out. Add some indicator that they're clickable, crop it down to what's really important (no window dressing) and make sure it'll fit on a window that's reasonably sized.
I'd also consider some sort of in-line image display technique or gallery, so you can illustrate exactly what you want the potential customer to see and take away from the screen - when I click on the screenshot, the text explaining what I'm looking at goes away.
Even the details themselves don't seem quite fleshed out enough. What data is being reported? In order to find that out, I have to go to the pricing page, then look at a footnote in difficult-to-read text at the bottom of the page. (In fact, get rid of the footnotes entirely. They make you look like you have something to hide - but nothing in the footnotes looks particularly bad.) Don't make me think - I might only give your page a few seconds to convince me, so tell me why your process snapshots are cool and useful if I'm trying to diagnose a problem (you do a better job of that in the video). Graphs, while handy, are boring on their own - tell me what data is being graphed, why your graphs are better, and why they'll help me keep my servers online.
To borrow from Kathy Sierra, your goal is to make me understand how and why your product is going to help me kick ass - in your case, why your product will help me keep my servers running smoothly and my clients happy. A few bullet points (while really good to have! seriously, after I decide your product is intriguing, the next thing I'll want to know is what it does) isn't quite enough on its own to make me understand why I want your product.
This all might be a moot point, however, since I already like the idea of the product itself, and that was after the lack of details basically forced me to watch your well-put-together video... so maybe it's working better than I thought. :-)
As others noted Server Density looks nice and functional. But I am just not getting the idea of using 3rd party service for monitoring CPU usage of my boxes. This goes against the grain of established IT practices, so I suspect you won't get much traction in a professional crowd.
The non-professional crowd (i.e. bloggers and such) will stick with a Free version for the eternity. The jump from $0 to $180 per year is just way to much for something that effectively solves the problem they don't know exists.
One professional IT niche you may want to target is an outsourced IT segment, i.e. companies providing managed server administration for organizations lacking their own IT departments.
I would also strongly advocate for selling standalone version. Not through the "contact us if you have a lot of servers", but right there on the front page. See how haveamint.com does it, for example. But even here you will have an uphill battle to wage against well entrenched existing monitoring solutions.
In any case - good luck. Looks like a thoughtfully designed product, but the positioning will probably require substantial tweaking.
Pricing - I was a little confused by the pricing (dollars vs. pounds) perhaps you could make the currency sign stand out a little more since I didn't notice it at first and was wondering what the difference was between the 10 and 15 plans were.
Support - I'm curious how offering phone support for the free product has worked so far. I'm not sure I've ever seen it before (not saying it's a bad thing, just something which I would imagine would be tough to scale).
Signup - Instead of directing everyone to the free signup page, you might want to think about directing them to the pricing page so that they have the opportunity to purchase the non-free plan right away.
Signup - Have you thought about listing out the metrics that are available in the free vs. non-free plans under the plans? It seems to me that those are a part of the core functionality which is important to users.
Phone support so far has been rarely used so it's really more of a sales point at the moment. In terms of scaling, it may well turn out not to be a feasible option in the future but free customers can upgrade any time so it's worth keeping them happy :)
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/1438/69220612.jpg
As you can see, the "Free Sign Up" button and video are out of place.
I can see paying $10/month for the ability to monitor 25 servers.. but not $15/month PER SERVER.
Also, you need FreeBSD support :)
Ditto on the currency point, I initially thought 10/15 meant two different price plans.
Also, I'd be eager to see a bit more info about how the monitoring script works, and exactly what data is being retained.