

Ask HN: Please review our project SiteCanary - irrelative

https://sitecanary.com/<p>Hi everyone,<p>We've been working on SiteCanary for the last couple months.  SiteCanary alerts you when your site goes down via email, SMS or instant message.  It lets you configure various tests - "asserts" - to make sure lots of things are looking good (http status, mime type, IP, dns server, etc), and you can configure things in the request like cookies and user agent.<p>We realize the idea isn't very innovative, but we're working on related products that will be targeted at the audience (small-business website owner), and wanted to solve a simple problem first.<p>Create a demo account so you can play with it for free at: https://sitecanary.com/demoaccount 
(currently hidden... but you guys are friends)<p>Let us know what you think!
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kiwidrew
It's a really clean site that feels responsive (even from .nz) and isn't too
cluttered -- great work!

A few bits of feedback: \- When I was adding a new site to check, it wasn't
immediately clear whether you support sending text messages to non-US mobiles.
The only example provided is formatted US-style (1-xxx-xxx-xxxx). I put in my
NZ mobile as 6421xxxxxxx and it did in fact work. I'd suggest adding a second
example number formatted as e.g. +44xxxxxxxxx and perhaps a link to a page
listing the countries you support. \- Perhaps an option to send a second text
message when the site comes back up? \- The subject line of the email which is
sent when the site comes back up is simply 'SiteCanary: accountname:'. It'd be
good to have this be 'SiteCanary: sitename is back!' instead.

~~~
irrelative
Thanks kiwidrew -- great feedback. We'll these fix things and they should be
out soon.

Cheers!

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aristus
Very clean value prop, easy and fast signup. Asserts is a good concept and
well-done.

I can't tell if the test contact worked -- I did not receive an email or an
IM. Don't know what contact to allow for gchat.

~~~
irrelative
Thanks for the feedback. Regarding IM, I think you need to add us to your
buddylist for gmail (sitecanary@gmail.com) -- we'll make that clearer! Email
should work always -- check your spam filter.

Cheers!

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jgfoot
I like it.

Your notification e-mails were flagged as spam by Yahoo mail. Consider using
DomainKeys or something like that.

I noticed your TOS requires that we only monitor sites that we own. Smart. In
case someone breaks this rule, you might want to give site owners a chance to
report problems. Maybe you could have a unique string in the user-agent that
would let you look up which of your users created that notification?

~~~
irrelative
We put SiteCanary in the user agent for that very reason -- we figure a really
curious person could figure it out from there. That said, the fastest polling
period is 1 minute, so we think it would be pretty hard to DoS someone with
this :-)

Good idea with DomainKeys -- gmail seems to be alright with a reverse DNS
lookup resolving to our domain.

Cheers!

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smokey_the_bear
I like it a lot. I'd been looking for something just like this. I set up a
test though, and when it alerted it only emailed me, I didn't receive the
gchat messages or sms.

EDIT - Upon further fiddling with it, I added my AIM account in addition to
GOOG, then I got both alerts.

~~~
smokey_the_bear
I'm trying to test a URL that checks if the result is cached, and if so,
redirects to the cached text file. So the http response code is either 200 or
301, it'd be nice if I could set the the response code check to not 500. Also,
I get an error when I try to remove the response code assert. "Error Check
that the URL is correct. " <https://sitecanary.com/deleteassert/1054/1110>

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dantheman
Nice, simple & clean.

On the bottom of the assert page, why do you have an add Asserts button & a
continue to checkups link? They should be combined into a continue button?

~~~
irrelative
Thanks for the feedback. We could see that being confusing... we'll fix it!

