

Ask HN: Review my product - Server Density - dmytton

"Monitor CPU load, memory usage, processes, disk usage and Apache status. Keep an eye on your servers and get e-mail/SMS alerts when things go wrong."<p>http://www.serverdensity.com<p>There are a lot of monitoring services available for up/down monitoring (e.g. Pingdom) or very detailed, complex monitoring (e.g. Hyperic/Nagios). The aim of Server Density is make internal (CPU load, disk space etc) monitoring as easy as possible as a hosted service.
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mdasen
Thoughts as I browse your site:

What's with the logo? I see an "s" and a ???

Beautiful layout. Simple, elegant, informative: makes me really trust your
service.

Oo, phone numbers! Very, very, very nice touch.

I wish there was US billing. I'm a little wary that my card will be charged in
Sterling. Is "converted upon payment" a way of saying that my card will
convert or that you'll convert and charge my card in USD? Also, I find it's
good practice to just settle on an international price even if that means that
sometimes different currencies see a discount/overcharge.

A volume discount would be nice. Monitoring 10 servers right now would run
£100. Maybe do something like, £10/server for the first 5, £6/server for 6-20,
and £3 for 21+. I'm guessing that the service doesn't put a lot of load on
your box and a big client with an IT department who won't be wasting a lot of
your time, but has a lot of boxes to monitor would be a catch. Small customers
are sometimes the most hassle so offer volume discounts.

Nice to see an alive blog with actual interesting things on it rather than a
simple "we have a blog" PR-type thing.

I gotta say, it looks mighty impressive. Clean, good looking, you seem to know
your stuff, I don't have many questions. Really, the big issue I see is that
there is no volume discount. I'd guess that the cost of dealing with two
customers each monitoring one server is higher than one customer monitoring
two servers. Especially as that number goes up - if I'm a network admin
monitoring 50 boxes for a company, I know what I'm doing and will figure out
things to a greater extent than some random one server person.

Very nice! Good luck!

~~~
dmytton
The ϱ is the Greek letter "rho" which is the official symbol for density :)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho_(letter)> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density>

Volume discounting is something we do have, just not on the site. Based on
your feedback it seems it might be worth mentioning that on the pricing page.

Thanks for the feedback.

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rufo
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Oops. This turned into more of a treatise than I'd realized. I
hope this is useful stuff, and not too nit-picky. I also see I'm the only one
so far mentioning these things, and I'm interested anyway, so maybe I'm just
being cranky. :-)

Your video is great, and the site design itself is quite nice, but the content
itself may need to be fleshed out and reworked a bit - I'm generally not a
huge screencast watcher, and if I didn't have an interest in the product I
might've clicked past almost immediately.

For an example, I didn't realize that the screenshots were clickable at first
glance. When I clicked on them I get a screenshot that's too large and zoomed
out. Add some indicator that they're clickable, crop it down to what's really
important (no window dressing) and make sure it'll fit on a window that's
reasonably sized.

I'd also consider some sort of in-line image display technique or gallery, so
you can illustrate exactly what you want the potential customer to see and
take away from the screen - when I click on the screenshot, the text
explaining what I'm looking at goes away.

Even the details themselves don't seem quite fleshed out enough. What data is
being reported? In order to find that out, I have to go to the pricing page,
then look at a footnote in difficult-to-read text at the bottom of the page.
(In fact, get rid of the footnotes entirely. They make you look like you have
something to hide - but nothing in the footnotes looks particularly bad.)
Don't make me think - I might only give your page a few seconds to convince
me, so tell me why your process snapshots are cool and useful if I'm trying to
diagnose a problem (you do a better job of that in the video). Graphs, while
handy, are boring on their own - tell me what data is being graphed, why your
graphs are better, and why they'll help me keep my servers online.

To borrow from Kathy Sierra, your goal is to make me understand how and why
your product is going to help me kick ass - in your case, why your product
will help me keep my servers running smoothly and my clients happy. A few
bullet points (while really good to have! seriously, after I decide your
product is intriguing, the next thing I'll want to know is what it does) isn't
quite enough on its own to make me understand why I want your product.

This all might be a moot point, however, since I already like the idea of the
product itself, and that was after the lack of details basically forced me to
watch your well-put-together video... so maybe it's working better than I
thought. :-)

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huhtenberg
I spent a couple of months on a market research for one of my own (external)
monitoring projects, so it's a rare case when I can produce an intelligent
comment :-)

As others noted Server Density looks nice and functional. But I am just not
getting the idea of using 3rd party service for monitoring CPU usage of my
boxes. This goes against the grain of established IT practices, so I suspect
you won't get much traction in a professional crowd.

The non-professional crowd (i.e. bloggers and such) will stick with a Free
version for the eternity. The jump from $0 to $180 per year is just way to
much for something that effectively solves the problem they don't know exists.

One professional IT niche you may want to target is an outsourced IT segment,
i.e. companies providing managed server administration for organizations
lacking their own IT departments.

I would also strongly advocate for selling standalone version. Not through the
"contact us if you have a lot of servers", but right there on the front page.
See how haveamint.com does it, for example. But even here you will have an
uphill battle to wage against well entrenched existing monitoring solutions.

In any case - good luck. Looks like a thoughtfully designed product, but the
positioning will probably require substantial tweaking.

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mrduncan
As far as the site, it looks great! I had a couple of quick thoughts as I
looked through it but overall everything was really easy to understand.

Pricing - I was a little confused by the pricing (dollars vs. pounds) perhaps
you could make the currency sign stand out a little more since I didn't notice
it at first and was wondering what the difference was between the 10 and 15
plans were.

Support - I'm curious how offering phone support for the free product has
worked so far. I'm not sure I've ever seen it before (not saying it's a bad
thing, just something which I would imagine would be tough to scale).

Signup - Instead of directing everyone to the free signup page, you might want
to think about directing them to the pricing page so that they have the
opportunity to purchase the non-free plan right away.

Signup - Have you thought about listing out the metrics that are available in
the free vs. non-free plans under the plans? It seems to me that those are a
part of the core functionality which is important to users.

~~~
dmytton
Thanks for the suggestions.

Phone support so far has been rarely used so it's really more of a sales point
at the moment. In terms of scaling, it may well turn out not to be a feasible
option in the future but free customers can upgrade any time so it's worth
keeping them happy :)

~~~
mrduncan
Interesting to hear. I think it definitely adds a little bit of credibility to
your service to be able to offer the free phone support (for as long as it's
feasible anyway).

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joshsharp
In terms of the site, you've done everything right in my opinion. Easy video,
lots of screenshots and benefits I can understand in a glance. A FAQ for more
detailed information. Very nice.

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catone
The design is very pretty, but it actually seems kind of broken to me in
Firefox 3.0.11 on the Mac (OS X 10.5.7, res: 1280x800). This is how it loads
for me:

<http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/1438/69220612.jpg>

As you can see, the "Free Sign Up" button and video are out of place.

~~~
dmytton
Thanks, I'll get that checked out.

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johng
Price seems way outrageous for server monitoring when there are free
utilities. TO monitor this stuff you have to be dealing with people who are on
the geekier side anyway... so you have to realize they have alternatives.

I can see paying $10/month for the ability to monitor 25 servers.. but not
$15/month PER SERVER.

Also, you need FreeBSD support :)

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akamaka
Looks very nice overall.

Ditto on the currency point, I initially thought 10/15 meant two different
price plans.

Also, I'd be eager to see a bit more info about how the monitoring script
works, and exactly what data is being retained.

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terpua
<http://www.serverdensity.com>

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caffeine
The per-server pricing is really expensive. That should be per 10 servers.

~~~
dmytton
We store a lot of data for customers and even at the lower disk costs from the
likes of Amazon S3, £1 per server per month is not viable. If you compare our
pricing to the commercial options from competitors like Hyperic ($1000s) then
ours is much more reasonably priced.

