Website monitoring

anton

Guys,

last winter I was looking for a website monitoring service that would drop me an SMS if my site goes down.

I wanted to find a free service, after all my website would not be down too often, and just and two or three texts per month would be enough.

All I could find were a paid services, for like $5/month or more. That didn't made much sense, after all my shared hosting was $10/month.

Ok, I thought, it's a very simple thing to check if a web page is up or down. I'll make my own. With blackjack and hookers of course.

So here it is http://monimi.net/ - website monitoring service with free SMS alerts.

Have a look, I hope you'll find it useful. Let me know if you like it or not.

Regards,
Anton

Joseph

its not accepting my mobile number

Joseph

ah its working now, will give some feedback in awhile

looks very good so far really handy

Wait, you wanted to find a free service so you made your own service that you have to pay for..

anton

Deaddude wrote: »

...
Wait, you wanted to find a free service so you made your own service that you have to pay for..

Well, I do hope to get few quids back with adsense.

Bob the Builder

cool. Thanks for providing the service.

anton

nevf wrote: »

cool. Thanks for providing the service.

Ah, you're welcome. BTW, was the boards.ie down just now for 10 minutes or so? Perhaps they would be interested in a free account too

ChicoMendez

not bad

however what is the definition of a site down ?

supposing your website is hacked - id imigine you would not get a text as the site would still be up! ?

anton

Well, the service is qute basic at the moment, "UP" means that monitoring server can look up the doman, connect and get "200 OK" from server.


Suggestions and feature request are welcome. Perhaps I could implement a check for a keyword presense on a page. Would that be a good idea?

egan007

Niceone, was looking for a text relay service - which one did you use for this? i.e. the text provider...

6th

anton wrote: »

Well, the service is qute basic at the moment, "UP" means that monitoring server can look up the doman, connect and get "200 OK" from server.


Suggestions and feature request are welcome. Perhaps I could implement a check for a keyword presense on a page. Would that be a good idea?

Thats a very good idea. You're keeping it simple which makes it appealing.

anton

egan007 wrote: »

Niceone, was looking for a text relay service - which one did you use for this? i.e. the text provider...

http://www.clickatell.com/

I think, you can find cheaper services like http://www.voipwise.com/en/sms_instructions.html but I haven't tried them myself.

Zascar

Looks good, well done. I've signed up and I think this could be a useful service for a lot of people.

Would not take my mobile number either, but I then see you need to add spaces. So instead of +35387200000 you need +353 87 2 00000 - maybe you should change this, some people will give up and leave it it does not work.

You should try to integrate the advertising into the page better, you'll make more money that way. I'd say there is hugh potential for this project. Let us know how you get on.

anton

6th wrote: »

Thats a very good idea. You're keeping it simple which makes it appealing.

I'll add that feature to my TODO list then

anton

Zascar wrote: »

Looks good, well done. I've signed up and I think this could be a useful service for a lot of people.

Would not take my mobile number either, but I then see you need to add spaces. So instead of +35387200000 you need +353 87 2 00000 - maybe you should change this, some people will give up and leave it it does not work.

You should try to integrate the advertising into the page better, you'll make more money that way. I'd say there is hugh potential for this project. Let us know how you get on.

Yes. I believe Deaddude had the same problem before, I'll fix that.

As of advertising, what would you suggest? Making it blend in into the interface?

anton

Zascar wrote: »

Looks good, well done. I've signed up ...

Heh, one more thing to fix -- there is no safeguards from entering wrong email address during the registration, and I think your email is incorrect. I'll send you details in PM.

Zascar

anton wrote: »

As of advertising, what would you suggest? Making it blend in into the interface?

Ads at the side would work better if the colours blended in with the site a little better, or maybe move them to the bottom...

What sort of traffic/membership have you go so far, are you doing much to promote it? Get on to the big blogs like Mashable and Techcrunch, they'd love something like this and you'd get loads of sign ups from it

anton

Zascar wrote: »

Ads at the side would work better if the colours blended in with the site a little better, or maybe move them to the bottom...

What sort of traffic/membership have you go so far, are you doing much to promote it? Get on to the big blogs like Mashable and Techcrunch, they'd love something like this and you'd get loads of sign ups from it

Well, I've just started promoting it. Got something like ten users at the moment, mostly boads.ie members . I want to get some feedback before trying to get more signups.

Zascar

I'll test it over the next few days and let you know.

What I would do is remove the advertising for now, and put it on only when you get a half decent membership base going. You're not going to make any real money from advertiting until you've got a good flow of members, and the site looks better and more professional without advertiting plastered all over it. Does look well I like the design of the site, modern and clean. Very Web 2.0

However, you need a better logo imo.... Get a good designer to whip one up, would improce the image even more!

anton

Zascar wrote: »

I'll test it over the next few days and let you know.

Thanks

Zascar wrote: »

What I would do is remove the advertising for now, and put it on only when you get a half decent membership base going. You're not going to make any real money from advertiting until you've got a good flow of members, and the site looks better and more professional without advertiting plastered all over it. Does look well I like the design of the site, modern and clean. Very Web 2.0

Yeah, I don't expect to make any money from ads right now but the free accounts have to be ad supported and I don't want to disappoint userbase in the middle of the run by a sudden introduction of the ads.

Zascar wrote: »

However, you need a better logo imo.... Get a good designer to whip one up, would improce the image even more!

That's a good point.

daymobrew

Small issue: The body background colour is not set.
Tiny typo on http://monimi.net/plans "SMS Notificatoins" should be "SMS Notifications" swap o and i.

anton

daymobrew wrote: »

Small issue: The body background colour is not set.
Tiny typo on http://monimi.net/plans "SMS Notificatoins" should be "SMS Notifications" swap o and i.

Thanks a lot! Both issues now fixed.

anton

CuLT

anton wrote: »

Ah, you're welcome. BTW, was the boards.ie down just now for 10 minutes or so? Perhaps they would be interested in a free account too

Am indeed, just signed up

donnaille

anton wrote: »

Well, I've just started promoting it. Got something like ten users at the moment, mostly boads.ie members . I want to get some feedback before trying to get more signups.

Haven't noticed anything amiss yet.

anton

CuLT wrote: »

Am indeed, just signed up

Wow, cool. Welcome

anton

donnaille wrote: »

Haven't noticed anything amiss yet.

I'm glad to hear that

anton

Just noticed, that I wasn't handling 303 "See Other" redirects properly. Fixed now.

CuLT

anton wrote: »

Wow, cool. Welcome

Ta.

Actually one thing would be useful; boards.ie goes offline at 4am each morning for a DB backup, not an ideal situation, but it would be nice to be able to have the notification disabled for a specific period of time, ie, the 20 minutes or so the backup takes.

A simpler solution would be for me to just have a work phone, or turn off my phone at night of course, but just thought I'd put it out there.

I imagine most other sites the size of boards.ie have at least two DB servers with one as a read slave that backups are run on, so maybe this is more of an edge case than it's worth.

anton

CuLT wrote: »

Ta.

Actually one thing would be useful; boards.ie goes offline at 4am each morning for a DB backup, not an ideal situation, but it would be nice to be able to have the notification disabled for a specific period of time, ie, the 20 minutes or so the backup takes.

A simpler solution would be for me to just have a work phone, or turn off my phone at night of course, but just thought I'd put it out there.

I imagine most other sites the size of boards.ie have at least two DB servers with one as a read slave that backups are run on, so maybe this is more of an edge case than it's worth.

There is something called "Quiet period" I'm not quite happy with the name as it's not very descriptive (and there is no documentation on the web site to tell you what it does) it's functionality is a bit restricted (i.e you can't specify weekdays, etc.), but it allows you to set a period in a day when no messages will be sent to you.

So you can set it "From 3:55" "To 4:25" to not receive any alerts during this period.

Anton

CuLT

anton wrote: »

There is something called "Quiet period" I'm not quite happy with the name as it's not very descriptive (and there is no documentation on the web site to tell you what it does) it's functionality is a bit restricted (i.e you can't specify weekdays, etc.), but it allows you to set a period in a day when no messages will be sent to you.

So you can set it "From 3:55" "To 4:25" to not receive any alerts during this period.

Anton

Oh, neat, cheers

anton

Guys,

I consider implementing a new feature, and would like know if you'd think it's a good idea:

You would configure a very limited ssh account to be accessed by monitoring server, and submit that account details.

The monitoring server will regulary connect to your server over ssh and gather data, things like RAM/swap usage, load averages, mysql/postgress load, etc.

The collected data will be analysed for any problems like excessive swapping, stored so you could access it later and see various charts, etc.

The only tricky bit here, is that you would have to allow monitoring server to ssh to your server. Would you consider this an excessive risk, that would turn you off from using this service at all?

anton

CuLT

I think it's probably redundant considering if it's possible for someone to grant your service an ssh account, they can probably install something like munin.

Would be a lot less hassle for you to implement too I'd imagine. Scraping a plethora of OSes for system information regularily via SSH just plain sounds like a bad idea. It's reinventing the wheel, and doing it as a square.

anton

Well, maybe it is. I was sort of thinking on focusing on linux vps installs mostly, where it would have an advantage of not having to install/maintain something like munin.