Show HN: Server Check.in, one year later

It's been a year since my original Show HN post [1] announcing Server Check.in [2], so I thought I'd post a reflection after my first year running the service.

Server Check.in is an inexpensive website uptime monitoring service that I started out of my own need—if I had no users, I'd still keep it going. Fortunately, there are enough paid customers to keep me interested, and I've learned a lot from their feedback.

I had a good initial batch of signups after the announcement post on HN. These early customers gave me a <i>lot</i> of feedback, and some suggested fairly major revisions to the service. It took a lot of discipline to make sure I only worked on the most valuable features first.

I decided early on to focus on stability, scalability, and performance before working on some requested features, which was a great decision. The distributed Node.js-based server checking is working very well, and my master server running Drupal/PHP/MySQL still has plenty of capacity.

Below are some of the major lessons I've learned in the past year; I wrote a blog post [3] explaining the points below with more detail, and I hope you can learn something from my experience.

  1. Your priorities are not your customer's priorities.

  2. Sales is an uphill battle (for a developer).

  3. Contributing back to OSS improves you and your code.

  4. Keeping a good work-life balance prevents burnout.

  5. Experimenting makes you a better developer. 

  6. It's harder than you think to build a simple tool like Server Check.in.

(Note: For HN readers, use coupon code SHOWHNAGAIN for 25% off a year of service.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350

[2] https://servercheck.in/

[3] https://servercheck.in/blog/server-checkin-one-year-later