nowfound

Life & fun · December 10, 2013

SC

Server Check.in, one year later

It's been a year since my original Show HN post [1] announcing Server Check.in [2], so I thought I'd post a reflection after my first year running the service. Server Check.in is an inexpensive website uptime monitoring service that I started out of my own need—if I had no users, I'd still keep it going. Fortunately, there are enough paid customers to keep me interested, and I've learned a lot from their feedback. I had a good initial batch of signups after the announcement post on HN. These early customers gave me a lot of feedback, and some suggested fairly major revisions to the service.…

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What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

It's been a year since my original Show HN post [1] announcing Server Check.in [2], so I thought I'd post a reflection after my first year running the service. Server Check.in is an inexpensive website uptime monitoring service that I started out of my own need—if I had no users, I'd still keep it going. Fortunately, there are enough paid customers to keep me interested, and I've learned a lot from their feedback. I had a good initial batch of signups after the announcement post on HN. These early customers gave me a <i>lot<&#x2F;i> of feedback, and some suggested fairly major revisions to the service. It took a lot of discipline to make sure I only worked on the most valuable features first. I decided early on to focus on stability, scalability, and performance before working on some requested features, which was a great decision. The distributed Node.js-based server checking is working very well, and my master server running Drupal&#x2F;PHP&#x2F;MySQL still has plenty of capacity. Below are some of the major lessons I've learned in the past year; I wrote a blog post [3] explaining the points below with more detail, and I hope you can learn something from my experience. 1. Your priorities are not your customer's priorities. 2. Sales is an uphill battle (for a developer). 3. Contributing back to OSS improves you and your code. 4. Keeping a good work-life balance prevents burnout. 5. Experimenting makes you a better developer. 6. It's harder than you think to build a simple tool like Server Check.in. (Note: For HN readers, use coupon code SHOWHNAGAIN for 25% off a year of service.) [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4901350 [2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;servercheck.in&#x2F; [3] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;servercheck.in&#x2F;blog&#x2F;server-checkin-one-year-later

Does the same job

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