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Comment by struppi | Hacker News Reader

You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business? I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it.

The price doesn't make a real dent in any serious budget, so why bother? And 600 dollars is really cheap compared to anything that could happen when you miss an important event. Email campaign not sent? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses.

I think the service is priced reasonably. If you think otherwise, start a competitor. If you can convince me that your service will reliably mail me on incidents no matter what catastrophe happens to your data center, I might use it over theirs (Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.).

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>You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business?

I get that. But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features. This isn't actually competing with DataDog, Munin, Nagios, New Relic on features or reliability.

>? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses.

If thats the bussiness risk you are taking, you shouldn't be depending on just a ping after a cron job! Phooff. You do realize this thing is essentially only measuring if the cron job has executed. Not if it is succesfull. Sure you can script the success/failure state. But how are you going to test that against a myrid of potential failure states? What does the proccess return when the OOMKILLER gets its? Do you know?

The only reason to use something that 'just does pings' is because it's not important enough, and you don't want to invest that much time and effort. Those other tools require to be a integral part of your setup, but they'll give you much better monitoring capabilities and actual ease of mind. More importantly, rather than warning you when things have gone wrong (after the fact), they'll warn you in advance things are not looking good. They'll monitor the actual proccess, not if they were launched every hour, but what they were up to.

This product is in a very interesting niche because it seems to target projects-not-important-enough-i-wouldnt-bother-but-if-its-this-easy-why-not. But it is not priced accordingly.

>Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.

Those projects where you don't need them for: those are only ones where a product like this makes sense. If there are lots of dollars on the line, i strongly suggest you use actual industrial-grade monitoring solutions, not a ping after a cron job.

>But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features.

Exactly. I sit on a quarter-million dollar budget for hardware and services, but I still have a value-for-money filter, and this doesn't pass it. I might as well use this:

https://github.com/grahambell/crab

for free, or pay for a monitoring solution that is higher reliability, is inside my network, and doesn't charge me per cronjob. Even at the bulk plan, half a cent for a single cron job to send a single daily http request and only alert the one guy who has an iPhone seems... unreasonable. It doesn't scale for me.

By way of comparison, for that price I can get 20 private repos on Github, which consume oodles of space and networking resources.

"I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it."

Yes, you do run a business, yourself. But outside that...

The problem with this sort of thinking is that, yes, sure, if you need it, you could happily pay $600/year for this service, and another, and another, and another, and pretty soon you're dropping $5-$10k on services. For a large business, that's probably not an issue (but even then, it's always out of someone's budget, not the entire company's), but for smaller companies, you're approaching a pain threshold.

>If you can convince me that your service will reliably mail me on incidents no matter what catastrophe happens to your data center

You do realize that it would take years to even establish a significant baseline against a simple VPS on any cloud provider in uptime?

It's much more important that you know which cloud provider and data-centers they are using, so you can verify you aren't actually running your servers in the same data-center.

Not that they mention it on their site, but a simple traceroute will tell you their ping-server is just a (bunch of?) Amazon instance(s). And Amazon is never down, right?

If somebody can convince you that their service will never be down, it's just means you gullible.

On the other hand, if your monitoring-service is in a different data-center from a different cloud provider, statistically speaking, chances are low, that your system and their system will be down at the same time. But you can expect a few false positives. With this kind of setup, you could get false positives just because outside-internet is not working.

Again, one would not use something like this for sensitive large scale productions. But very few large scale productions are sensitive, and very few sensitive productions are large scale.

Yet, if its this easy, why not slab it on every system anyway? Oh wait, the price.

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