

Show HN: usefulping, will alert you if your webapp is down - Adirael
http://usefulping.com/

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barryhunter
Why should we trust this service? How do we know what ever system you have
running the pings is reliable?

Nearly every free app I've seen like this has ended up getting pulled because
the dev underestimates the resources needed to run it. Its easy to run when
only a few apps being monitored, but not trivial at scale.

~~~
Adirael
As long as I'm not taking money for it you shouldn't trust it. It's not
scalable without taking money from people. I can probably some hundred URLs
with the resources I've got right now, but nothing serious.

Right now I only check from one location and there's probably some bugs in my
code (which I'll work on fixing as soon as I find them!) but I'm planning to
add a second location in order to have some redundancy.

What this thing does is simple enough to replicate in a bash script (it's just
some curl and text matching) but today it was a slow day and things got out of
hand a bit :)

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Adirael
Last week one of my little toys went down. I was busy and I didn't realize
till six hours has passed so I throw together this little app. It's probably a
bit buggy but should work mostly OK. It supports HTTPS but doesn't check
certificates. It also should support redirects.

If you see anything not working as it should or have any suggestion, I would
love to hear some feedback!

EDIT: There was a little but I already fixed in which some sites were being
sent notifications even if they were up, let me know if it happens to you!

~~~
twelve45
Good work. Small typo on your frontpage that you may want to fix: "webiste".

~~~
Adirael
Thanks, it's corrected now.

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niggler
First line says

    
    
        usefulPing pools your site every minute and tells you if it goes down.
    

Do you mean to say _polls_ ?

~~~
Adirael
Yes. I was watching Community while writing the copy and was a bit distracted.
I corrected it, thanks!

~~~
StuieK
Best excuse ever.

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jasoncrawford
Great idea, but Pingdom already does this job nicely.

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lrm
I like it. Nice and simple. One thing I'd like to see is being able to submit
multiple apps/sites at the same time.

~~~
Adirael
Maybe adding a 'Bulk' button somewhere and turning the input in a textarea
(and disabling the substring search) would work...

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zalew
how would you compare your service to <http://www.monitor.us/website-
monitoring> (which I'm happily using for a few years)

~~~
Adirael
That's really cool, I didn't knew them.

Comparatively... They have a product and I got an MVP. Dashboard, response
times, an API, etc. That's a lot to offer.

I just needed email notifications :)

