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Comment by niks | Hacker News Reader

I have a couple of websites but one primary email account. So when I tried to add the second site I got this message: "We only allow one monitoring per email."

Is there a specific reason for that? I'd like for all my sites to come to one email since its the only one I check regularly.

Other than that I really like it. Super simple and easy to use. good stuff.

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If you're on gmail, you can place a dot on any part of the username, and it will redirect to your account. For example,

johndoe@gmail.com john.doe@gmail.com j.ohndoe@gmail.ccom

etc. all go to the original johndoe@gmail.com, but pretty much every website will interpret them as different emails.

On gmail you can also use a plus sign after your username: yourname+spamsignup1@gmail.com

This isn't a GMail feature. Most (but not all...) email servers allow this.

Thanks for the feedback. I just pushed a change which ups the limit to 10 monitorings per email address. I'm a bit hesitant to having no limit at all due to the ease of abuse. After all, I do have to pay for the BW out of my own pocket.

Provided that you can guarantee reliability, charge a buck a site (forever, for a year, a month... figure it out). Maybe offer the first few sites for free so people try out the service. I'd pay a buck a site

Check out AreMySitesUp.com (and other competitors) and their pricing, and offer something more competitive price-wise.

I'll see how far the free model takes me. If the monthly server costs starts to take away a considerable chunk of my salary I'll probably consider taking payments from the most active users.

As you've alluded to this marked is swamped with competition. Usability, pricing, and features are the only attack vectors as I see it.

sweet.. 10 is a good number. Its also a number you can use to turn this into a business.

If you ever ditch the freemium model, say first 3 sites are free and the rest you charge for.

This will please the common joe schmoes like myself who have a couple of sites but might not want to pay (my uptime isn't super critical...yet). Secondly it'll show other business who have 5+ servers (like we do at work) that you're taking it seriously. And more importantly it'll bring in money for you to cover the costs and maybe turn it a real business.

Pingdom has other features that they charge for so it might be worthwhile looking there...if you ever want to run it as a business. I know on your site it says this was a past time project and maybe you'd prefer to keep it just that...which is totally cool

First of all I don't think this will become a Pingdom clone/killer. Ease of use, simple, and unobtrusive are values that I will continue to value when deciding on where to take the project.

If I do decide to take money for premium features (more monitorings, higher monitoring frequency, history/statistics) I think I will do so with the hope of getting enough subscriptions to cover the server costs. If it provides more revenue than that I could see myself providing SMS notices to non-paying and paying users alike.

great feature and thanks for adding it so fast.

One little note: there's nothing in the user experience that tells me if you tie all of the monitors to the email address (i.e. is email address a unique key), so after I add the first one, I don't know if I always have to click through to settings to add another, or if I can do it from the home page.

Yep, email address is a unique key, so you can sign up from the home page with the same email address. As you've probably seen the link from the settings page actually takes you to the home page (with your email address as a query parameter which it fills in for you).

I'm not sure how I could make this clearer without cluttering the experience for the first time user. Maye store your email in a cookie and fill it in when you enter the home page?

Maybe change the link that says "go back to home" to say "add another monitor" or "manage your monitors" something similar - since that's really the only action you can do anyway.

Only one email acct? They're free at so many places.

I have several (to go with different identities) that all fwd to one location.

So for this app I would use

* mysite1.com@mymaindomain.com -> to mymaindomain@gmail.com

* mysite2.com@mymaindomain.com -> to mymaindomain@gmail.com

* mymaindomain@mymaindomain.com -> to mymaindomain@gmail.com

true, but I think you missed the my point. Because the site is so easy to use don't make me do all this work to use something so simple. just enable multiple sites / email and i'll be happy as a user because it solves my need in 2 steps.

myemail+mysite1wasitup@gmail.com works :)

+1 for multiple sites per email. Otherwise, looks cool!

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