

Show HN: My new service - Certician, a tool for monitoring your SSL certificates - nopal

Hello HNers.<p>I'm launching my new service, Certician, and I'd love some feedback from HN users.<p>A while back, I asked if anyone knew of any good, simple tools or services for monitoring SSL certificates [1]. I didn't find any compelling services, so I decided to build one.<p>I tried to keep it simple, since it's self-run and bootstrapped.<p>I know my landing page needs help. It's a lot harder to distill down a service (even a simple one) into compelling, actionable copy than I thought!<p>I have to work at my real job today, so I'll only be able to reply when I have time to take a break for a coffee run or lunch. I will do my best to reply to all comments over the weekend though.<p>Thanks for your feedback and for being an awesome community!<p>P.S. As others have said, I'm a little embarrassed the state of parts of the site, but I needed to launch. I've never asked anyone to pay me for a site like this, but I really do think it will be useful to many people and businesses. Hopefully others do too!<p>[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1675586
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ecaroth
I like the simplicity of the design! I too have a few suggestions:

1] The top screenshot is pretty "jarring", which I'm sure was you intent and
works well.. However, it doesn't indicate what happens when the ssl cert is
invalid & users would see this screen. I think it would be much more
informative to add an arrow pointing to an email inbox or something indicting
that you get alerted when this situation happens. Additionally you may want to
change the site url to "www.mysite.com" or something - If I was Amazon and saw
that screen, I wouldn't be very happy.

2] Email is great, but you gotta add cell phone (sms) support in some
capacity. You can do this on the cheap by just offering support to the major
cell providers via their email-to-sms gateway instead of using a paid service
like Twilio or Tropo. It's not as clean, but it's cheap and easy. You just
have to have the user put in their cell phone & provider and just send a much
shorter alert notice. Here's a good list of email-to-sms gateways:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways>

3] If I were going to use this service, it would be important for me to know
how often your service is pinging my sites to verify SSL cert integrity - once
ever minute, once every five mins? Couldn't find this on the page or FAQ

Otherwise this is a great idea! I can definitely see the usefulness of a
service like this, and I wish you great success!

~~~
nopal
Thank you for taking a look, I appreciate your feedback!

1) I see what you mean. I need to make more use out of that area.

2) I agree. Twilio is pretty inexpensive, so I may go ahead and integrate with
them. At first, I was seeing this as less of a near-real-time service and more
of a, "hey, heads up" service, but I can see real value in providing more
immediate monitoring and notifying.

3) Great point. I'll definitely add this to the FAQ, and FYI, it's polling
every hour right now. As I mentioned above, I'm rethinking this, so I'll
probably decrease the polling wait period significantly and I might make it
user configurable. The connection is very light weight, so it's easy on my
server and the clients'.

I'm glad you think it's a good idea. There doesn't seem to be much interest
yet, but I'm still optimistic!

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karterk
Don't be embarrassed, great job on going ahead and shipping it! Some
suggestions:

1\. Make the call of action buttons larger. E.g. "subscribe now", "try for 30
days" etc. They should be larger.

2\. I see that your layout is single column with images showing the app. But
when I scroll down to the bottom, there is no call of action there! You should
probably put a big button there saying "Begin your free 30 day trial today!"

[added more:]

3\. The "Try Certician free for 30 days!" link goes to your FAQ page! This
should go to your payment page.

4\. Right now the different plans all lead to different payment pages. I
suggest you make them all go to the same page but use a drop down select box
to allow the user to change the plan if one wants.

~~~
nopal
Thanks for the feedback!

I like all of your suggestions, and I'm going to work on implementing them.

------
nopal
Link: <https://www.certician.com/>

~~~
nreece
Can't access the site. Getting an error in Chrome 12: Error 111
(net::ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED): Unknown error.

~~~
nopal
Are you still? I'm able to access it using Chrome 12.0.742.122 for Mac.

