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You have to make sure your periodic tasks acts in such a way that if a piece fails, the rest doesn't execute (using && for instance). Then you would add hitting your special url the last thing to execute.

If you have a way of checking things like this, great! You should keep doing that!

Thanks! I'll think on some of this stuff and probably incorporate some of it.

I'm not sure how it's misleading. You can sign up and have one snitch for free. It would be misleading if I said sign up for free and then didn't allow you to create ANY snitches without paying.

Haha, sorry. Maybe you shouldn't squat on domains? :P

What I'm saying is, in the rare chance we are down and your service can't check in, that one time we would send a false positive. We wouldn't be flapping between off and on sending you a lot of false positives. The resolution on our checks is so large (the smallest is an hour) that we won't be flooding you with emails in any case.

We don't replace something like monit to make sure your process continues to run, we are validation that one-off periodic things run... things that are easy to forget about but are important.

I'm not sure I understand, however, it works by your process reaching out to US to check in. I'd suppose you would maybe have to open up outbound traffic to our domain? I'd love to hear more. Feel free to email hi@deadmanssnitch.com.

Thank's for pointing out that price != cost. The value of the service is in not having to ever panic again when checking the backups during an emergency.

It is very easy to be notified when something happens (for example, MAILTO in cron) but it's hard to know when something DOESN'T happen, especially if you work on a lot of sites.

There are plenty of ways to be notified when something doesn't happen if you are willing to use a little elbow grease... we use one of them to make sure DMS itself is working properly.

The pricing is more based on value. It is the price my clients said they would be more than willing to pay to never have to panic again when there is some EC2 problem and the backups stopped working weeks ago.

This actually happened over the weekend:

https://twitter.com/tikaro/status/250286735064436736

RE: SLA... the use case is more "I want to know sooner than later that something didn't happen" than "Something didn't happen this minute, I want to know NOW!". If and when we go down, your task won't be able to check in and we'll end up sending you a false "positive" which is better than not knowing at all when something fails.

What are you currently using to make sure your periodic tasks run?

As far as making sure DMS runs, we use another third-party to make sure our checkers run. Contact support if you are interested in finding out more.

It could have been done for cheaper, especially legal. However, I don't think the design would have been as good for cheaper. Keep in mind those were "retail", I had some "friend discounts" I didn't want to make public.

Legal is tough, the weight loss industry can be kind of scary because people can get hurt. It is especially scary if you are doing something "weird". Most new websites or businesses will not need a custom TOS, PP, etc. They can tweak one that already exists.

1) You weigh in by taking a picture of your feet on the scale. Sure, you can photoshop it or lean on a table (it's actually kind of hard to do that), but in the end, if you cheat, all you do is get your money back, you don't make money.

2) Pretty much everything out there is positive reinforcement. We try our best to help you succeed, we would rather get a tip than keep your money because you failed to make your goals. For years I would try to lose weight for a couple of weeks and then my life would go back to normal. I wanted something where my life would be WORSE if I failed so I made LIOLI.

Yup! That's right! That's why we don't tell our users HOW to lose weight, but help them set reasonable weekly goals and "punish" them if they don't stick to them.

I know how to lose weight, it's the sticking to it over a long period of time and not procrastinating that is hard. I built this for myself, and it is working great!

I would say plan for some traffic you can afford, but know of someone that can help you out if you really get into trouble. It's along the lines of "worry about that problem when you have it, because that problem is a great one to have".