Top all-time · #5037
Oh Dear
Company blog · ohdear.app/blogsystemssecurity
Oh Dear is the company blog at ohdear.app, writing about systems and security. Since 2018, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “Show HN: Monitoring a Website: OhDear”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link Oh Dear as a hosted monitoring service for SSL certificates, uptime, cron jobs and status pages. One commenter cites its Caddy and Laravel subdomain writeup as an alternative approach.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Website health monitoring in one tool: uptime checked every minute, SSL certificates, DNS, cron jobs, broken links and performance, plus status pages.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: Monitoring a Website: OhDear5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-10-03
- /2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-09-15
- We used Caddy and subdomain routing to serve our status pages2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-18
- Oh Dear identified a certificate problem at a large CDN provider2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-12
- Certificate lifetime limited to 1y since September first, 20202 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-06
- The day PHP sites went offline on purpose2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-06
What Hacker News says?
Re: "Eliminate the broken URL risk" This approach of monitoring a single URL is useful, especially if you can use the free version of monitoring services. It doesn't, however, go far enough. Does your site only consist of a single page? Are there no links between pages? Or links to external resources? There are few things as off-putting to your visitor by presenting them a link that ends in a 404 page. Forgive the s…
Comment linking /
on “This Page is Designed to Last”Submitted SQL performance improvements: finding the right queries to fix as a story · 40 points
HN discussionHi! We’ve done this exact same thing and have a technical writeup here: https://ohdear.app/blog/how-we-used-caddy-and-laravels-subdo... Tl:dr: very easy to do, Caddy takes care of 90% of the complexity.
Comment linking /blog/how-we-used-caddy-and-laravels-subdomain-routing-to-serve-our-status-pages
on “Show HN: Caddy 2”Submitted Show HN: Monitoring a Website: OhDear as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFor web-application monitoring, we’ve [1] gone the approach of outside-in monitoring. There’s many approaches to monitoring and depending on your role in a team, you might care more about the individual health of each server, or the application as a whole, independent of its underlying (virtual) hardware. For web applications for instance, we care about uptime & performance, tls certificates, dns changes, crawled br…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What do you monitor on your servers?”Submitted How we identified SSL certificates affected by Let's Encrypt mass-revocation as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://ohdear.app does that.
Comment linking /
on “Microsoft Teams outage due to expired certificate”Submitted The day PHP sites went offline on purpose as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHey! Sorry to hijack the thread for the other, but just like the OP we've spent the last few years building Oh Dear and it does about 99% of what you're looking for. [1] It has uptime, performance, SSL alerts and status pages. What's missing is the performance graphs on the status page, which is coming in a few months. Simple Ops goes further than us by also measuring FCP though. [1] https://ohdear.app/
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Simple Ops – My new microstartup after three years of indie hacking”Submitted Just for Black Friday, we're doubling our prices as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis issue is largely cause by people still stuffing old root certificates in their certificate chains, and serving that to their users. As a general rule of thumb: 1) You don't need to add root certificates to your certificate chain 2) You especially don't need to add expired root certificates to the chain For additional context and the ability to check using `openssl` what certificates you should modify in your ch…
Comment linking /blog/resolving-the-addtrust-external-ca-root-certificate-expiration
on “CA Root expired on 30 May 2020”Submitted What alerting on 1.8M outages has thought us about downtime as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHi Jake! Enter your website URL in here, and it'll tell you if you're affected or not: https://ohdear.app/tools/certificate
Comment linking /tools/certificate
on “Around 293 intermediate CAs in violation of CA/Browser guidelines”Submitted Show HN: A tool to check if your site is among the to-be-revoked SSL certs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere's a very quick way to check if you may be affected: this will check all certificates in the chain to see if they match the fingerprint of the to-be-revoked list. https://ohdear.app/tools/certificate
Comment linking /tools/certificate
on “Around 293 intermediate CAs in violation of CA/Browser guidelines”Submitted The last 24 hours in PHP land, as observed by a monitoring service as a story · 2 points
HN discussionShameless plug, but I built a monitoring solution with extensive SSL checks that’ll catch & report these if they’re revoked: https://ohdear.app
Comment linking /
on “Around 293 intermediate CAs in violation of CA/Browser guidelines”Submitted The effects of the Cloudflare outage on Oh Dear as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's my (uninvited) observations: You seem to have a strong focus on persona's: makers, bloggers, designers, agencies. But have you actually checked if these specific target groups need a service like yours? And if they are willing to pay for it? The vast majority of makers, bloggers and designers, arguably will use cloud services or platforms to get their content out. Those who do host their own website, probably…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What's your latest failed side project and why?”Submitted Reducing PHP's CPU usage by nearly 40% by upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWe use a similar service called Oh Dear that does CT monitoring: https://ohdear.app
Comment linking /
on “I revoked $1M worth of EV certificates”Submitted Certificate lifetime limited to 1y since September first, 2020 as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> The next problem that people will run into is that because they can't reliably run multiple "things", they won't have a monitoring stack to tell them that certs aren't renewing. Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I follow; there's nothing preventing people from using something like https://ohdear.app/ (or any other monitoring tool) with a self-contained solution like Caddy. In fact, I recommend that people do.
Comment linking /
on “Techcrunch SSL Cert Expired”Submitted Oh Dear identified a certificate problem at a large CDN provider as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis status page link from php account on mastodon https://ohdear.app/status-page/php-infrastructure-status-pag...
Comment linking /status-page/php-infrastructure-status-page
on “Php.net Is Down”Submitted Chrome next steps for security: mixed content checking more important than ever as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMost companies prefer to fix any downtime before it's noticed, and sharing any details on a status page means admitting something went wrong. There's plenty of status page solutions that tie in uptime monitoring with status updates, essentially providing a "if we get an alert, anyone can follow along through the status page" for near real-time updates. But, it means showing _all_ users that something went wrong, whe…
Comment linking /features/status-pages
on “Ask HN: Why are most status pages delayed?”Submitted We used Caddy and subdomain routing to serve our status pages as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat might be interesting to be notified about is certificate issued but not deployed (i.e. in CT logs, but not presented by web server). What's the compelling reason to use this over, say, Hardenize[1] or Oh Dear[2]? [1]: https://www.hardenize.com/ [2]: https://ohdear.app/
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Never have an SSL certificate expire again”Submitted On Black Friday, our service is twice as valuable. So our price goes x2 as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
